3. Adding space to Acronis Cyber Infrastructure

Before you create new disks, consider the following recommendations for their sizing:

  1. If you have a cluster of several nodes, the nodes should be the same size for redundancy reasons. Then, the data will be spread more evenly among them. For more information, refer to Understanding allocatable disk space.
  2. Having the same-size disks helps distribute the loads more evenly. Inside a cluster, the disk usage is proportional to the disk size. For example, if you have a disk of 10 ТB and a disk of 2 TB, a 50% cluster load will use 5 ТB and 1 TB, respectively.
  3. The disk performance depends on its size. In general, the greater the disk capacity, the higher the performance. However, in particular cases, the throughput of several smaller disks can exceed that of one larger disk. For example, the comparison of Premium SSD sizes in Azure shows that two 1-terabyte disks provide a higher total throughput than one 2-terabyte disk. Therefore, carefully consider your needs and your cloud provider’s recommendations.

If you want to increase physical space in your storage cluster, you need to create and attach new data disks. Do not use the resize disk function of Azure on your Acronis Cyber Infrastructure VM, as the file system will not be resized correspondingly. Instead, create a new managed data disk and attach it as described below.

Create and attach a new disk to your Acronis Cyber Infrastructure VM, as outlined in Add a data disk. After that, the added disk will be listed in the node’s disks in the admin panel of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure.

In the admin panel, follow these steps to configure the new disk:

  1. On the Infrastructure > Nodes screen, click the name of the node with the created disk. Go to the Disks tab to see all the node disks.

  2. The disk with the Unassigned role is the one that you created earlier. Select it, and then click Assign on the right pane.

  3. On the Choose role screen, select the Storage role, a tier, and enable checksumming, if required. For more info, refer to Assigning disk roles manually.

    _images/creating_storage_cluster3_ac.png

You can also remove the virtual disk from a virtual machine, as described in Detach a data disk using the portal.