Adding additional storage volumes

At some point or another, you'll reach a situation where you'll need to add additional storage to your server. On physical servers, we can add additional hard disks, and on virtual or cloud servers, we can add additional virtual disks. Either way, in order to take advantage of the extra storage we'll need to determine the name of the device, format it, and mount it. In the case of LVM (which we'll discuss later in this chapter), we'll have the opportunity to expand an existing volume, often without a server reboot being necessary.

When a new disk is attached to our server, it will be detected by the system and given a name. In most cases, the naming convention of /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and so on will be used. In other cases (such as virtual disks), this will be different, such as /dev/vda, /dev/xda, and possibly others. The naming scheme usually ends with a letter, incrementing to the next letter with each additional disk. The fdisk...