Vultr Block Storage For FreeBSD

Information in this article deals with modifying disks, partitions and filesystems and should be fully understood before following any examples as data loss or an inoperable system may otherwise result.

How to identify your Vultr Block Storage devices

Vultr block storage shows up as /dev/vtbd* devices (VirtIO Block Device)

View current /dev/vtbd entries with ls -al /dev/vtbd*

# ls -al /dev/vtbd*
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x43 Mar 25 09:55 /dev/vtbd0
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x45 Mar 25 09:55 /dev/vtbd0p1
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x46 Mar 25 05:55 /dev/vtbd0p2
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x44 Mar 25 09:55 /dev/vtbd1

vtbd0 and vtbd1 are individual devices. vtbd0p1 and vtbd0p2 are two partitions on the vtbd0 device.

Which is the new Vultr Block Storage device?

Since the newly added block storage hasn’t been partitioned yet, it’s probably vtbd1, but let’s verify.

View current GPT partitions with gpart show (or gpart list for more details) to show all GPT partitions on all devices.

# gpart show
=>       34  335544253  vtbd0  GPT  (160G)
         34         94      1  freebsd-boot  (47K)
        128  335544159      2  freebsd-ufs  (160G)

So we see the two existing partitions and their filesystems on vtbd0. vtbd0 contains our existing boot device and root filesystem.

We can also verify this by running mount to see what partition is mounted as /. This confirms that vtbd0 contains the root filesystem.

# mount
/dev/vtbd0p2 on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, multilabel)

How to partition and mount your new Vultr Block Storage devices

To use a new Vultr block storage, it must be partitioned and a filesystem initialized and then mounted.

In this example we’re creating one partition (with a GPT partition scheme) for the entire block storage (50GB). We’ve already determined the name of our new block storage device (vtbd1 in this example), so use the gpart create -s GPT vtbd1 command.

# gpart create -s GPT vtbd1
vtbd1 created

Now add one partition with label ‘vultrblockstorage’ and set it to freebsd-ufs.

# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l vultr/_block/_storage vtbd1
vtbd1p1 added

This should have created a new device called /dev/vtbd1p1 and and can be verified by running gpart list vtbd1p1

Initialize the UFS2 filesystem on the new partition.

# newfs -U vtbd1p1
/dev/vtbd1p1: 51200.0MB (104857528 sectors) block size 32768, fragment size 4096
    using 82 cylinder groups of 626.09MB, 20035 blks, 80256 inodes.
    with soft updates
super-block backups (for fsck_ffs -b #) at:
 192, 1282432, 2564672, 3846912, 5129152, 6411392, 7693632, 8975872, 10258112, 11540352, 12822592, 14104832, 15387072, 16669312, 17951552, 19233792, 20516032, 21798272, 23080512, 24362752, 25644992, 26927232, 28209472, 29491712,
 30773952, 32056192, 33338432, 34620672, 35902912, 37185152, 38467392, 39749632, 41031872, 42314112, 43596352, 44878592, 46160832, 47443072, 48725312, 50007552, 51289792, 52572032, 53854272, 55136512, 56418752, 57700992, 58983232,
 60265472, 61547712, 62829952, 64112192, 65394432, 66676672, 67958912, 69241152, 70523392, 71805632, 73087872, 74370112, 75652352, 76934592, 78216832, 79499072, 80781312, 82063552, 83345792, 84628032, 85910272, 87192512, 88474752,
 89756992, 91039232, 92321472, 93603712, 94885952, 96168192, 97450432, 98732672, 100014912, 101297152, 102579392, 103861632

Now you’re ready to mount the new device for use!

Create a mount point

# mkdir /mnt/blockstorage

Add en entry to the /etc/fstab file for easy mounting (and automounting at startup).

# echo /dev/vtbd1p1 /mnt/blockstorage ufs rw,noatime 0 2 >> /etc/fstab 

Mount the new block storage device

# mount /mnt/blockstorage

The storage is now available and ready for use at /mnt/blockstorage

# df -h /mnt/blockstorage/
Filesystem      Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/vtbd1p1     48G    8.0K     45G     0%    /mnt/blockstorage