pfSense Freebsd Increase Disk Partition Size

I recently increased the size of a disk for a pfSense proxmox VM, this outlines how.

Increasing the disk size in promox is simple

• Select the VM
• click Hardware
• click on the disk you want to increase
• click disk action
• select resize
• enter the amount of GiB you want to increase the disk size by.

To make use of the newly allocated space in the pfsense/freebsd VM here are the steps:

Disable and Delete Existing Swap Partition

Find the existing swap entry in /etc/fstab, then turn the swap off and delete the partition.

In this example my disks are identified by gptid, but the procedure is the same if it is by label.

cat /etc/fstab

/dev/gptid/ae09f6d0-b2dc-11ec-ac87-71ed21a342e4 /             ufs   rw,noatime  1       1
/dev/gptid/ae10d27b-b2dc-11ec-ac87-71ed21a342e4        none          swap  sw          0       0

swapoff /dev/gptid/ae10d27b-b2dc-11ec-ac87-71ed21a342e4

Find the correct swap partition and delete it. vtbd0 is the disk name and 3 is the partition index.

gpart show

=>      40  33554352  vtbd0  GPT  (16G)
        40    409600      1  efi  (200M)
    409640  31047680      2  freebsd-ufs  (15G)
  31457320   1677312      3  freebsd-swap  (819M)
  33134632    419760         - free -  (205M)

gpart delete -i 3 vtbd0

Resize root partition

My disk was 16gb in size and I increased it to 32gb. I will allocate 31gb to the root file system and leave the remaining 1gb for the swap.

gpart resize -i 2 -a 4k -s 31G vtbd0
growfs /

-i 2 (index partition 2) -a 4k (block size) -s 31G (size) vtbd0 (device)

Recreate Swap

This command will add a swap partition with a 4k block size to the vtbd0 disk device.

gpart add -t freebsd-swap -a 4k vtbd0

Now enable the swap, first identify the gptid of the swap, I use glabel list and find the gptid with the correct size (my new swap)

glabel list

swapon /dev/gptid/9ba77482-57dd-11ed-ae7c-d927ed59507a

Now correct /etc/fstab to remove the old swap entry and enter the new swap entry.

nano /etc/fstab

/dev/gptid/ae09f6d0-b2dc-11ec-ac87-71ed21a342e4 /             ufs   rw,noatime  1       1
/dev/gptid/9ba77482-57dd-11ed-ae7c-d927ed59507a        none          swap  sw          0       0

After a reboot you should see the proper root file system and swap size in pfsense.