Virtual Private Server User Guide

Internet and UNIX Basics

Your virtual disk contains the operating system that your virtual server runs on, 

along with your files and other data. Your virtual server belongs only to you and 

behaves like a physical disk drive. Other virtual servers on the physical machine 

that hosts your server do not have access to your virtual disk. 

The size of your virtual disk depends on the specific VPS server that you 

purchased. You can check to see how much free space is left on your virtual disk 

through the VAdmin Web interface or by using the df command from the 

command line. 

The df command returns a report on three important filesystems that are available 

to your server, including your virtual disk. By default, the information is displayed 

in 1 kilobyte blocks, but df can be made to display a more intuitive report when run 

with the  h flag, which stands for "human readable."

Below is some sample output from df  h, as run on a virtual server that was 

ordered with a 500MB virtual disk:

Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on

/dev/vn70a     583M    34M   503M     6%    /virtual/home/ip.add.re.ss

The first column, /dev/vnxa, is the device name of your virtual disk. The x will be 

replaced with an number between 5 and 254 depending on the number assigned 

to your virtual server by the physical machine that hosts it. 

The second column indicates the size of the virtual disk, the third column shows 

how much of the disk space has been used, and the fourth column shows how 

much of the disk space is still available to be used. 

You may wonder why the size is reported as 583 MB for this 500MB virtual disk. 

The reason is that we adjust the size of the virtual disk when you order it to 

accomodate the space required by your operating system and preinstalled 

applications. 

You may have also noticed that, although the total virtual disk size is 583 MB and 

only 34 MB are in use, only 503 MB shows as being available. Hidden disk space 

accounts for this discrepancy. The UNIX operating system reserves a small 

percentage of space on the disk drive to maintain optimal performance and for 

potential emergencies. Once the disk has reached 100% capacity, only the 

superuser and system programs canuse the hidden space. 

The fifth column displays a percentage of how disk space has been used. 

Because the system keeps a portion of the space in reserve, it is possible to see a 

disk that is over 100% capacity although we do not recommend that you allow the 

disk to exceed 100% capacity. Doing so can prevent your server applications from 

functioning properly. You should keep your disk capacity below 100% by clearing 

unnecessary files or by increasing the size of your virtual disk. 

The last column displays the location of the virtual disk on the physical machine 

that hosts your server. This information is usually irrelevant to customers. 

3FS   Fast Flexible File Sharing

Technical Training Department

August 2004

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