Sometimes we may need to create additional volumes or partitions to separate application or user data from operating system data. In this article, we will create two new volumes, "U:" and "L:", as if they were to be used for user data and logs on a Windows Server hosted on Clouding.
Create a server on Clouding
When creating the server, we must select only the amount of space we want for the "C:" drive so that we can later expand the volume and create the necessary partitions. In the following example, we create a server with 25GB of space for the "C:" drive.
Once we have selected the space, we click "enviar" and wait for our server to be ready.
Disable automatic volume extension
By default, servers are configured so that when we resize the SSD, the volume automatically extends to use the newly available space. However, for this procedure, we need to disable this service so that we can create the partitions.
To do this, we connect via RDP to our server and open the system services.
We find the "cloudbase-init" service and click "Properties".
Finally, under "Startup type", we select "Disabled" and click "Apply", then "OK".
Resize the SSD in the client panel
The next step is to return to the client panel and click "Redimensionar" for the server. We increase the disk size by adding the amount of space we want for the volumes. In this example, we select 75GB to create two new volumes of 25GB each.
Once we have selected the space, we click "Enviar" and wait for the resizing process to finish.
Create the new volumes
In this step, we reconnect to our server via RDP and open "Server Manager", where we will create the new volumes. In "Server Manager", we go to "File and Storage Services > Volumes > Disks". As we can see, the disk is now 75GB and we have 50GB of unallocated space.
We right-click the disk and select "New Volume".
In the next window, we click "Next", since we only have one disk.
We assign a drive letter and click "Next".
We assign an "Etiqueta" to the volume so that we can quickly identify the type of information stored on it later, and leave the remaining options as shown in the image.
Finally, we review the details, click "Create", and wait for the process to finish.
We repeat the process for all the additional volumes we want to create.
Once the volumes have been created, we will see the new "U:" and "L:" volumes alongside the "C:" volume, as shown in the image.
If we go to "This PC", we will see that we can now access the new volumes.
Re-enable cloudbase-init
One of the first steps we took to create the volumes was to disable the "cloudbase-init" service to prevent the "C:" volume from extending automatically when we resized the disk in the client panel.
To re-enable it, we need to reverse the process. We go to "Services", right-click "cloudbase-init", and select "properties".
Finally, under "Startup type", we select "Automatic" and click "Apply", then "OK".
With these steps, we will have created the new volumes we need on our Windows Server.