Why does the storage size differ on my Dedicated Cloud Server?

This article applies to Dedicated Cloud Servers.

In this article we will explain why you see less then the HDD offered on a Dedicated Cloud Server using a RAID-10 configuration.

Currently the host systems are partioned as follows:

  • 100 GB for the operating system (/)
  • 1 GB for the boot partition (/boot)
  • 65 GB of Swap*
  • 200 GB for Bare Metal specific data (/vz)
  • 1.5 TB for VM data 5% of this is always reserved for the root user of the hosts system (default ext3 setting) (around 100 GB)

Since the virtualization needs to create additional files twice the size of the available RAM, that’s another 100 GB which can’t be used for the VM hard drive image.

The rest of the “missing” space is used to store the VM configuration and also reserved for additional files which are created while the backup is run and merged into the main hard disk image afterwards.

The reason this is so different on Dedicated Cloud Servers in comparison to Basic Cloud Servers is that Basic Cloud Servers use several RAID-1 sets of which one is used for all the config files and the rest for the VM whereas the dedicated uses RAID-10 and has 1 set and uses this for everything from config to the VM itself.

  • On a 2 TB (4x1000GB) Configuration you will have 1.2 TB of free disk space.
  • On a 4 TB (4x2000GB) Configuration you will have 3.2 TB of free disk space.

* Please Note: The size of the Swap is not always 65 GB. It varies depending on the size of the host system RAM, which is between 65 GB and 196 GB.