Increase Storage Capacity In Zimbra Network And Open Source Appliance

Our VirtualBox installation of Zimbra Network Edition Appliance has been “Upgraded” to a Zimbra Open Source Edition Appliance. The default message store volume is small for a production server, so I’m going to increase the capacity. While it’s easy to increase the size of your VMDK disk images in using the clone/resize/clone process, it’s equally easy to add capacity through the VirtualBox console in phpvirtualbox.

Method 1. clonehd/resize/clonehd

Shutdown your Zimbra Appliance.

At the VirtualBox host console use vboxmanage to clone the VMDK to a VDI:

vboxmanage clonehd “original-source.vmdk” “new-output.vdi” –format vdi

Then resize the new VDI:

vboxmanage modifyhd “new-output.vdi” –resize 2048000

This will resize the VDI to 2TB, (1024MB*2000)

Now Clone the new, resized volume back to the original name and format:

vboxmanage clonehd “new-output.vdi” “original-source.vmdk” –format vmdk

Start your Zimbra Appliance and put the additional disk space in the logical volume.

Method 2. Add new virtual disk to the virtual machine’s logical volume.

With the Zimbra Appliance shutdown, open the configuration for the device through phpvirtualbox and click on storage.

Select Create New Disk

Select the disk type.  I’m going to use the same VMDK format as my other disks in this machine.

Choose whether to use a dynamically allocated disk, or fixed disk size.

Select the size for this disk and click Create.

Now the new volume will appear in your storage setting for your virtual machine.

Power up the machine, and Zimbra will automatically allocate the new space to the default logical volume unless you specify a different volume.