I don’t think most of us need to know Linux, but if you end up managing a system, it’s good to have a little idea of how to get around. This is a short series of posts as I remember the skills I used to have back in university.
While working with some SQL Server 2017 tests, I ran out of disk space. I tend to size my VMs around 40GB, and that works for some things, but I’ll run out of space.
I needed to expand the VMWare disk. That doesn’t mean Linux sees the space directly, and I had to figure out how to make the partition bigger. I could have added another disk, but I wanted to work through this process. I learned I needed to have an inactive partition, so I download gparted on a live cd and booted to that.
Next I started working through a few of the tutorials on Linux partitions. This one on AskUbuntu was helpful, as I ended up having to move my swap partition to the end of the disk.
GParted isn’t completely intuitive for a Windows guy, but I muddled through it.
Once I had the operations I wanted, I applied them, and partitions moved.
I rebooted, and checking the main partition properties, I had space.
Now, back to SQL Server on Linux.
Voice of the DBA 
I have to do this about twice a year as my media server VM grows. One of these days I will build a proper NAS and replace the bloated old VM with a lean and mean new machine.
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Or move to containers. Those are starting to look good to me.
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It’s even easier if you use the logical volume manager. Then, you can do this from a command line and do not need a GUI to run gparted. Check out http://www.davidklee.net/2017/07/24/sql-server-on-linux-series-additional-drives/ for more details.
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Not sure that’s easier. A glance through there wasn’t clear, but the issue I had was I couldn’t alter a partition in use. Had to boot from a mini distro.
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