Add A Volume in Linux

Hostwinds offers your the ability to add storage to your VPS through volumes. This article will take you through the steps of creating a storage volume in your cloud portal and mounting it on your Linux VPS.

Adding the Volume

First we begin by logging into the Hostwinds Client Area.

Step One: From your client area click on Cloud Control, when you see the drop down click on Cloud Portal.

Step Two: After being redirected to the next page, click on Storage then Volumes.

Step Three: Create your volume by selecting the following:

Select the Volume Size from the drop down menu

Provide Volume name that you can easily remember

Select the Volume Location from the drop down menu

Click the Add Volume button

Step Four: Once the volume has been created, click on the Actions button on the right side of the Volume to attach the Volume to a VPS.

Step Five: You will get a pop-up where you can choose the VPS from the drop down menu to attach the volume to

Step Six: Once the volume has been attached you will see a similar image letting you know the device that has been attached.

Partitioning The Volume

Step One: Log into the VPS and check your device.

fdisk -l

You will see the unpartitioned disk /dev/sdb 

Step Two: Use parted to partition the disk with the following commands.

parted /dev/sdb

mklabel gpt

mkpart primary 1M 100%

print

quit

Step Three: The output should be similar to this

Step Four: Format your partition with desired file system. In this case we’re using xfs .

mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1

Mounting the volume

Step One: Create a directory where you wish to mount. In this example, the directory name is /mnt/myvolume 

mkdir /mnt/myvolume

Step Two: Get the unique identifier or UUID of /dev/sdb1. 

blkid

Step Three: Using your favorite text editor edit your modify the /etc/fstab  adding the line below. Note that this is a unique identify for each device. Make sure to acquire the UUID of your drive using the blkid  as detailed above and replace /mnt/myvolume  with the directory name you mounted your Volume to

UUID=8246d5a0-bea3-4872-a39e-d3ac1ddb4a51 /mnt/myvolume xfs defaults 0 0

Step Four: Run the mount command to mount the Volume drive to the mount point of your choosing

mount -a

Step Five: To verify that it’s been mounted.

df -h