Most of the solutions I design and develop are deployed to a Linux server. Before “DevOps” became a thing, there were always server admins ready willing and able to help with setting up the deployment environment and handling the day-to-day maintenance afterwards. Lately I have been left to my own means to get these tasks done and have learned some commands, written a several bash scripts for repetitive or automated tasks and bookmarked enough reference sites to be productive while still not considering myself an expert and definitely not an administrator.
So, being cautious, I prefer to have a virtual machine that is close to the environment I will be deploying my work to, especially bash scripts that can bring things down faster than they build them up if there some errant typo in the right-wrong place. I once built the duplicate virtual machine image from scratch, which I found to be a painful and dissatisfying experience given that I wanted the machine chiefly due to my lack of expertise with the finer points of configuration and administration. The next best thing to building it yourself (or first best thing, in my case) is to find one that is already pre-built and then add the necessary customizations to it. There are a plethora of free Linxu VM images out there, and finding one that is fairly close to the enterprise standard of my current client is usually fairly simple. The one thing that is almost always an issue is that the free images have a small hard drive in the configuration. If it is a case where another drive can be created and mounted, great. But recently I ran across a production configuration where the everything was off the root mount and I finally figured out how to enlarge the drive on the VM image without too many headaches. Here is how I did.
First, this is based on using VirtualBox. I have not used VMWare in a long time, but I believe the first stage of enlarging the capacity on VMWare may be even easier than with VirtualBox, which is where we start in the slide show below.
To save writing down the command from the slide show, you can copy and modify the following:
"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" modifyhd "Ubuntu 15_40GB.vdi" --resize 40960
© Scott S. Nelson