AN APPLIANCE SERVER WITH A DRIVE PARTITIONING SCHEME THAT ACCOMMODATES APPLICATION GROWTH IN SIZE

摘要

For accommodating different sizes of applications during an automatic re-provisioning of an appliance servera disk drive of the appliance server is partitioned with a system partition, a network operating system (NOS) partition, a float partition, and an images partition. The float partition provides additional space to the NOS partition and the images partition. A re-provisioning utility initiates a create image utility and an apply imageutility, whereby an image file of a current application and associated operating system is created and a stored image file of a second application is installed on the appliance server. When the apply image utility is initiated,the NOS partition can be dynamically extended into the float partition server. Similarly, when an image fileis stored in the images partition the images partition can be dynamically extended into the float partition.