Increase the Storage Capacity of the vRealize Log Insight Virtual Appliance

You can increase the storage resources allocated to vRealize Log Insight as your needs grow.

To increase the storage space of a vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance, you must add a new virtual disk to the virtual appliance. This is the only supported option.

Instead of adding numerous smaller disks, It is recommended that you add fewer large disks of up to 4 TB (+ OS drive) total addressable storage. The total can be a combination of two 2-TB disks, or four 1-TB disks, and so on. To learn more, see vRealize Log Insight Configuration Limits.

Note:

• You must add the same amount of storage to each node in a vRealize Log Insight cluster.
• In a multi-node cluster, you must perform operations such as shutting down, adding storage, and restarting, on one node at a time.

  You can add storage to nodes in any order. However, it is recommended that the internal load balancing (ILB) node must be the last node to receive additional storage.

Prerequisites

• Log in to the vSphere Client as a user who has privileges to modify the hardware of virtual machines in the environment.
• Shut down the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance safely. See Power off the vRealize Log Insight Virtual Appliance

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Client inventory, right-click the vRealize Log Insight virtual machine and select Edit Settings.
2. On the Hardware tab, click Add.
3. Select Hard Disk and click Next.
4. Select Create a new virtual disk and click Next.
   1. Type the disk capacity.
      vRealize Log Insight supports virtual hard disks of up to 2 TB. If you need more capacity, add more than one virtual hard disk.
   2. Select a disk format.

      Option	Description
      Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed	Creates a virtual disk in the default thick format. The space required for the virtual disk is allocated when the virtual disk is created. The data residing on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand later, after first write from the virtual appliance.
      Thick Provision Eager Zeroed	Creates a type of thick virtual disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. The space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the flat format, the data residing on the physical device is zeroed out when the virtual disk is created. It might take much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks. Create thick provisioned eager zeroed disks whenever possible for better performance and operation of the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance.
      Thin Provision	Creates a disk in thin format. Use this format to save storage space.

   3. (Required) To select a datastore, browse for the datastore location and click Next.
5. Accept the default virtual device node and click Next.
6. Review the information and click Finish.
7. Click OK to save your changes and close the dialog box.

Results

When you power on the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance, the virtual machine discovers the new virtual disk and automatically adds it to the default data volume. Completely power off the virtual machine first. For information about powering on virtual appliances, see https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-6-pubs.html.

Caution: After you add a disk to the virtual appliance, you cannot remove it safely. Removing disks from the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance may result in complete data loss.