How can size of the root disk in Google Compute Engine be increased?

Question

The root disk size in GCE is 10 gigs. How do I increase this? I cant find the option in the console or the gcutil flags. This can be easily done in AWS.

Answer 1

As of 31 Mar 2016, you can resize a persistent disk online without stopping or rebooting the VM, without taking snapshots, and without having to restore it to a larger disk.

The blog post announcing the feature has the details, and you can see the docs for how to do this via the console:

Resize the persistent disk in the Google Cloud Platform Console:

1. Go to the Compute Engine page.
2. Click on "Disks" in the sidebar
3. Click the name of the disk that you want to resize.
4. At the top of the disk details page, click "Edit".
5. In the "Size" field, enter the new size for your disk.
6. At the bottom of the disk details page, click "Save" to apply your changes to the disk.
7. After you resize the disk, you must resize the disk partitions so that the operating system can access the additional space.

Or via CLI:

gcloud compute disks resize example-disk --size 250

Then, on Debian/Ubuntu/etc. run:

$ sudo apt install -y cloud-utils         # Debian jessie
$ sudo apt install -y cloud-guest-utils   # Debian stretch, Ubuntu
$ sudo growpart /dev/sda 1
$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1

or, for RedHat/Fedora/CentOS/etc.:

$ sudo dnf install -y cloud-utils-growpart
$ sudo growpart /dev/sda 1
$ sudo xfs_growfs -d /                    # CentOS 6 needs `resize2fs`

Note that some operating systems will automatically resize your partition on reboot without requiring you to do any manual steps with tools such as fdisk, resize2fs or xfs_growfs, so it should be sufficient to just resize the disk and reboot the VM for changes to take effect.