My hands started shaking today when I was about to resize a partition on a live, production hypervisor.

Who came up with the idea that the only way to *inflate* a partition was to fricking delete it and recreate it again?!

I know that as long as I keep its start at the same disk sector and only increase the partition size, not decrease it, its gonna be fine. Still. Deleting stuff on a live system makes me nervous.

You must have a standby system to take over while you do the partitioning right? Or backups at least?

Are you mad?

@alexbrooklyn no standby was available I am afraid, it was a single machine running two virtual servers for a single web app.

Of course I had backups of the system, in case something terrible was to happen. And I even backed up the partition table, just in case.

But yes, it worked. The Linux kernel doesn't reload disk partition schemes until reload or until its told to, using tools like partprobe. So if the new partition had the exact same start position, and at least the same same or more sectors allocated, nothing could happen as long as the server didn't crash between delete and re-create.

Which it didn't, and now, the partition is successfully resized.

Shame that its not as easy as with filesystems. Online resize with those hasn't been a problem for a while now...

When your hands literally hold the future of your company/job

I can almost guarantee your balls are bigger than mine