unmap

[jprovine7]

I heard that unmap was going to become a part of the 6.5, is this enabled or disabled by default? I run the unmap manually on my flash arrays but i have a couple of spinning disks SAN that have never had the unmap run on them and I am not sure what would happen if it were automatically run.

[daphnissov]

UNMAP is automatically enabled for VMFS-6 datastores only. For VMFS-5, you'll still need to manually issue UNMAP commands.

[jprovine7]

VMFS - virtual machine file system, won't that change as I upgrade to 6.5 and then it will work on any of my sans automatically?

[daphnissov]

No, because there is no upgrade path from VMFS-5 to VMFS-6. You must create new datastores on VMFS-6 and svMotion the VMs.

[vpradeep01]

From the KB: VMware Knowledge Base

VMFS 5 and VMFS 6 can coexist. However, due to the changes done in VMFS 6 metadata structures to make it 4K aligned, you cannot inline/offline upgrade from VMFS5 to VMFS6.

You need to create a new VMFS 6 datastore and Storage vMOtion the VMs from VMFS 5 to VMFS 6.

Thanks

[jprovine7]

But is the umap process going to run automatically with the wmfs 5.6?

[daphnissov]

With VMFS-6, yes; with VMFS-5, no.

[jprovine7]

I am formulating a plan to upgrade my vmfs from 5 to 6 so i can take advantage of the automatic unmap process

[daphnissov]

As I said earlier in this thread, there is no upgrading VMFS-5 to VMFS-6. There is only creating new datastores formatted as VMFS-6 and migrating VMs over to it/them.

[jprovine7]

Yes  I understood there isn't a "upgrade"  that it is more a a reformat of the storage, not sure what word I should have used instead

[jprovine7]

Do you have an article that indicates that the auto unmap does not occur when you upgrade the esxi server or the vcenter to 6 or 6.5 that is only occurs when you update the vmfs to 6 or 6.5? I need the information to give to someone else

[daphnissov]

The vSphere docs should have this. UNMAP has absolutely nothing to do with vCenter, only VMFS (which implies a version of ESXi). There is no VMFS-6.5 file system.

[jprovine7]

"UNMAP is automatically enabled for VMFS-6 datastores only. For VMFS-5, you'll still need to manually issue UNMAP commands" So when you said this it is saying that upgrading the esxi server to 6.5 will not enable the auto umap process it is only after you upgrade the vmfs to 6 that is will become automated

I will try to search again in the KB's

[daphnissov]

There is no upgrading of VMFS-5 to VMFS-6 as I believe I've said earlier. There is only to create VMFS-6 anew and perform svMotions to that volume. Since there is no upgrading of VMFS-5 to 6, similarly, upgrading to ESXi 6.5 gets you nothing.