In this video, you will learn about volume resizing options that one has to consider. Block storage contains both boot volumes and block volumes, and Oracle today supports online resize of volumes. Both boot and block volumes can be resized, but how do you do that? Earlier in OCI, you had to detach a volume before it can be resized. Today, you can resize it online without the need to detach the volume as such. In order to resize a volume, you will have to go to the Volume page. Either you go to the Boot volume page, for example, and from a given Boot volume page, hold on a moment, even if there is a compute instance currently running using the boot volume, you can very well go to the Boot volumes page in every specific region and use the menu here to edit it, and you can do an online resize. Remember, you can only increase the size, you cannot decrease the size and the storage level provisioning would be done at dynamic moment. But look at the problem here. We have the volume with a replica being created in another region. You will not be able to resize it. I told you about this when we spoke about the replica feature that is coming. If you want to resize a volume which is having a volume replica in place, you will need to disable the replication and then resize it and again go back and enable replication which would be a re-creation of the replica. But if you have a volume without replication in place, which is the case here, I can go and increase the size, which will be a storage level provisioning that will be expanded. But then, if you log in to the OS and look into the content, it will still show the old size. You need to follow standard system administration task to increase the boot file system or root file system and consume the additional space that is provisioned. That's about increasing the boot volume size. As you see here, the boot volume got increased in size in a few moments. Whereas for block storage volumes, also the same is applicable. You can increase the volume. Again, for block volumes also, you can only increase the volume size, you cannot decrease the volume size, and once you make the change, this is a dynamic online increase, but you need to still go and increase the file system space in the volume by running OS commands to consume that additional space. Thus, you have the ability to increase the size of a volume at runtime without any downtime. The other way to re-size a volume is you can have a backup of a volume and when you provision a new volume, you can set it to be of a larger size. For example, if I have a backup in place or my block volume or boot volume, I can go and say Create a new block volume. I can choose any AD and it can get provisioned with the original size of the volume from where it was provisioned or I can choose a new size. Again, at the storage level, you will have the space provisioned, but at a file system level, you need to run commands to consume the additional space. Thirdly, you have the ability to clone. When you clone an existing volume, you have the ability to choose the target size of the new volume. If I have a volume available and I create a clone, it gives me the ability to resize the cloned volumes size. Again, you need to run OS commands to consume the additional space. The traditional old way to increase the volume was to get it offline detached from the instance and do it, which also you can perform. Now, when you are doing these volume resize, remember, volume size can only be increased and you cannot resize a volume if there is an already running re-size that is currently still going on. Once it is completed, you can resize it or if there is a current clone operation going on, you will have to wait for that to complete. If there is a backup that is currently going on, again, you can't resize and volumes may not have attachments added. Meaning when you are doing a resize, you cannot attach the volume or detach the volume when the resize is happening. These are all things you need to consider when you are operating within the OCI environments, you will get errors, just like how when a volume is having a replica getting created in another region, you would not be able to resize. These are all things to be kept in mind when you work with block volume re-size operations.
