Breaking down the problem

As we enter the last year of support for CheckPoint R80.40, it’s time to finally get all management servers upgraded to R81.10 (if not done already). But I ran in to a problem when creating a snapshot on our management server in GCP:

This screen didn’t quite make sense because it says 6.69 GB are free, but the root partition actually shows 4.4 GB:

[Expert@chkpt-mgr:0]# df
Filesystem                      1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_current  20961280 16551092   4410188  79% /
/dev/sda1                          297485    27216    254909  10% /boot
tmpfs                             7572656     3856   7568800   1% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_log      45066752 27846176  17220576  62% /var/log

As it turns out, the 6 GB mentioned is completely un-partitioned space set aside for GAIA internals:

[Expert@chkpt-mgr:0]# lvm_manager -l

Select action:

1) View LVM storage overview
2) Resize lv_current/lv_log Logical Volume
3) Quit
Select action: 1

LVM overview
============
                  Size(GB)   Used(GB)   Configurable    Description         
    lv_current    20         16         yes             Check Point OS and products
    lv_log        43         27         yes             Logs volume         
    upgrade       22         N/A        no              Reserved for version upgrade
    swap          8          N/A        no              Swap volume size    
    free          6          N/A        no              Unused space        
    -------       ----                                                      
    total         99         N/A        no              Total size  

This explains why the disk space is always inadequate – 20 GB for root, 43 GB for log, 22 GB for “upgrade” (which can’t be used in GCP), 8 GB swap, and the remaining 6 GB set aide for snapshots (which is too small to be of use).

To create enough space for a snapshot we have only one solution: expand the disk size.

List of Steps

After first taking a Disk Snapshot of the disk in GCP, I followed these steps:

! On VM, in expert mode:
rm /etc/autogrow
shutdown -h now

! Use gcloud to increase disk size to 160 GB
gcloud compute disks resize my-vm-name --size 160 --zone us-central1-c

! Start VM up again
gcloud compute instances start my-vm-name --zone us-central1-c

After bootup, ran parted -l and verify partition #4 has been added:

Expert@ckpt:0]# parted -l

Model: Google PersistentDisk (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 172GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name       Flags
 1      17.4kB  315MB   315MB   ext3                       boot
 2      315MB   8902MB  8587MB  linux-swap(v1)
 3      8902MB  107GB   98.5GB                             lvm
 4      107GB   172GB   64.4GB                  Linux LVM  lvm


Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_log: 46.2GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End     Size    File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  46.2GB  46.2GB  xfs


Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/vg_splat-lv_current: 21.5GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End     Size    File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  21.5GB  21.5GB  xfs

Then converted the partition to an empty volume and gave it to GAIA:

pvcreate /dev/sda4 -ff
vgextend vg_splat /dev/sda4

After all this, lvm_manager shows the free disk space is being seen:

[Expert@ckpt:0]# lvm_manager

Select action:

1) View LVM storage overview
2) Resize lv_current/lv_log Logical Volume
3) Quit

Select action: 1

LVM overview
============
                  Size(GB)   Used(GB)   Configurable    Description         
    lv_current    20         8          yes             Check Point OS and products
    lv_log        43         4          yes             Logs volume         
    upgrade       22         N/A        no              Reserved for version upgrade
    swap          8          N/A        no              Swap volume size    
    free          126        N/A        no              Unused space        
    -------       ----                                                      
    total         219        N/A        no              Total size 

Creating a snapshot in GAIA is no longer a problem: