Vultr's Cloud Block Storage technology allows you to mount high-performance scalable storage to your instance, making space management significantly more flexible. This storage is highly available, redundant, and SSD backed for superior performance. Block Storage is available in our New Jersey location.
Use this guide to manage your block storage.
Navigate to the Add Block Storage page in the customer portal.
Vultr will allocate your storage. Refresh the page and wait until you see Active in the status column before proceeding.
You can attach block storage to one server in the New Jersey location at a time.
The server instance will restart, and the block storage will be available as a new device.
🛑 Warning: The commands below may destroy data on existing volumes. These instructions are for newly-deployed block storage volumes without data. Before proceeding, back up your files. Vultr does not have any backups of your block storage. Verify your backups and store them separately from the server instance.
Vultr snapshots and backups of server instances do not include block storage.
By default, Vultr does not create any filesystems on block storage volumes. Use these steps to initialize, delete all data, and mount the block storage volume.
Verify the new device name. The first block storage device is connected to your server as /dev/vdb. Additional devices will be labeled /dev/vdc, /dev/vdd, and so forth. Use the lsblk
command to verify your device name. This example shows a 10 GB volume available as /dev/vdb.
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
vda 252:0 0 55G 0 disk
└─vda1 252:1 0 55G 0 part /
vdb 252:16 0 10G 0 disk
Create a new disk label using parted
.
# parted -s /dev/vdb mklabel gpt
Make a primary partition to fill the entire disk.
# parted -s /dev/vdb unit mib mkpart primary 0% 100%
Create an EXT4 filesystem on the primary partition and format it.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb1
Make a mount point.
# mkdir /mnt/blockstorage
Add a blank line and a mount entry to /etc/fstab. This will automatically mount the block storage at /mnt/blockstorage at reboot.
# echo >> /etc/fstab
# echo /dev/vdb1 /mnt/blockstorage ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
You can also manually mount the block storage without rebooting.
# mount /mnt/blockstorage
🛑 Warning: The commands below may destroy data on existing volumes. These instructions are for newly-deployed block storage volumes without data. Before proceeding, back up your files. Vultr does not have any backups of your block storage. Verify your backups and store them separately from the server instance.
Vultr snapshots and backups of server instances do not include block storage.
By default, Vultr does not create any filesystems on block storage volumes. Use these steps to initialize, delete all data, and mount the block storage volume. The following steps are based on Windows Server 2016, however the basic process is very similar for all current versions of Windows.
The right pane displays the current disk configuration. The first block storage device connected to your server is usually Disk 1. Additional devices will be Disk 2, Disk 3, and so forth. This example shows a 10 GB volume as Disk 1.
If the disk is offline, right-click on the new disk volume and select Online.
Right-click on the new disk volume and select Initialize.
Select MBR or GPT partition style and click OK.
Right click on the Unallocated Space and select New Simple Volume.
Follow the wizard to format and attach the volume.
📝 Note: Linux instances need to remove the any references to the block storage volume from the
/etc/fstab
file before detaching to prevent system boot failure due to the OS waiting on a drive that no longer exists.
You can move block storage between servers, but take care to properly dismount the volume and remount it on the new server. 🤚 Attention: If you need to preserve data, do not re-partition, create a new filesystem, or perform the initialization steps that delete data.
Expanding block storage requires two steps:
Click the Manage icon on the desired Block Storage instance.
Click the Size link to adjust the size.
Enter the new size, type YES in the confirmation field, then click Continue.
Reboot the attached server instance using the server control panel to apply the new size. Rebooting the OS from an SSH session will not apply the changes.
You can resize your block storage to reflect the changes made in your panel with the growpart
utility. The growpart utility is provided by cloud-init and is available for all major Linux distributions and *BSD.
Unmount the block storage.
# umount /mnt/blockstorage
Use the lsblk
command to verify the partition name. This example shows a 10 GB partiton as /dev/vdb1. Note that the mountpoint is blank, because it was dismounted in step 1.
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
vda 252:0 0 55G 0 disk
└─vda1 252:1 0 55G 0 part /
vdb 252:16 0 10G 0 disk
└─vdb1 252:17 0 10G 0 part
Grow the partition to fill all available block storage space.
# growpart /dev/vdb 1
Force a filesystem check before resizing.
# e2fsck -fp /dev/vdb1
Resize the filesystem to fill the entire partition.
# resize2fs /dev/vdb1
Remount the block storage.
# mount /mnt/blockstorage
The right pane displays the current disk configuration. The block storage device will have new unallocated space available. Right-click on the volume and select Extend Volume... as shown.
Follow the wizard to extend the volume.
It's not possible to perform an in-place downgrade or "shrink" block storage. If you'd like to move your files to a smaller block storage subscription, perform these steps:
df
.The Vultr API offers several endpoints to manage block storage.
You can upgrade block storage by using the steps described here. You must resize your file system manually, which does pose the risk of possible data loss if performed incorrectly. You cannot perform an in-place downgrade of block storage, but you can use these steps to migrate your files to a smaller block storage subscription.
No. Block storage may only be attached to instances in the same region.
No, this is not currently supported. Additionally, automated backup do not back up block storage volumes.
No, this is not possible.
Yes, you can mount multiple volumes to the same instance. While there is no hard limit set, you should not mount more than 8 to 10 volumes to ensure system stability.
No, this is not possible.
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