Not enough free space to install Veeam worker on Proxmox VE (and how to expand a PVE volume)

Luca Dell'Oca,

I was installing the other day a new nested lab to play a bit with Veeam Backup & Replication and Proxmox VE. I registered my cluster without any issue, but when I tried to install my first worker in the hypervisor I encountered this error:

The text says:

“Failed to upload the worker image: import failed: cp: error copying ‘/var/tmp/pveupload-1b9a50c497b27e71ecb63f19b76d621c’ to ‘/var/lib/vz/template/iso/PveWorker_13.2.0.457.img’: No space left on device”

“Worker wkr1 test failed: import failed: cp: error copying ‘/var/tmp/pveupload-1b9a50c497b27e71ecb63f19b76d621c’ to ‘/var/lib/vz/template/iso/PveWorker_13.2.0.457.img’: No space left on device”

Apparently, there was not enough free space to upload the Veeam iso file PveWorker_13.2.0.457.img. As said, my nodes are nested VM’s, so indeed I created them with the absolute minimum hardware specs. Specifically for the local disks of each node, I crated a virtual disk with 16 GB of space, and I thought it would have been enough. The problem however was how the PVE installer automatically partitioned it:

As you can see from the picture, the LVM volume where all the root partition is mounted was only 7 GB, and 4 of them were already used by PVE. I went to check the size of this img file, and it was 1.2 GB, but for some reason the upload was failing, maybe because there is a need for extra space for temporary caching or other reasons. Anyway, since it’s a nested server it was much easier and faster to just increase the storage. Here’s a quick recap of the procedure:

  1. I increased the size of the virtual disk on the baremetal hypervisor adding 10 more GB
  2. in PVE shell, rescan the disks:

    echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/rescan
  3. check the new space added to the sda disk: 
    lsblk
  4. Resize the partition where the LVM volume pve is hosted using the added free space: 
    parted /dev/sda
resizepart sda3 100%
  5. since it’s an LVM volume, first resize the PV (physical volume): 
    pvresize /dev/sda3
  6. then, rezise the LV (logical volume): 
    lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/pve/root
  7. Finally, extend the ext4 partition that PVE uses to store the pve-root volume: 
    resize2fs /

The volume now has 10 more GB of free space:

I tried again to install the Veeam worker, and this time it completed successfully:

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