Advices sharing Datastore between Esxi 5.5 cluster and single esxi 6.7 host

[mlocatster]

Good morning,

I have an esxi 5.5 cluster, not upgradeable, with two hosts connected and managed with a vCenter Server. These two hosts are connected to a SAN SAS storage.

Today I connected to the same SAN a new host that is alone (not managed by a vCenter) with esxi 6.7u3. At SAN level I mapped this new host to the same "SAN cluster" so it can access the same LUNs and datastores as the other esxi 5.5 hosts.  All the datastores in the SAN have VMFS version 5.58.

Now in a test datastore and using the esxi 5.5 cluster I created two esxi 5.0 virtual machines with a linux os installed. After installation I did some tests with success:

- Import one virtual machine in the new esxi 6.7 host and booted it successfully

- Powered off the virtual machine in the esxi 6.7 and started it again from esxi 5.5 cluster successfully

- Keeped one virtual machine running in the esxi 6.7 host and the other on the esxi 5.5 cluster successfully

As with this configuration I lose VMFS 6 advantages but I don't need to keep the datastores and LUNs separated between esxi 5.5 and 6.7, that is a simplier management for me, I'm considering to move to production this configuration.

Has anyone a similar configuration in production?

As my fears are regarding possible data corruption in mixed esxi environments, has anyone some advices about this?

The esxi 5.5 cluster is in High Availability, can this make some problems in the new configuration?

Thank you very much

Matteo

[mlocatster]

Good morning,

After one week of testing using multiple datastores with VMFS 5 shared between an esxi 5.5 GA (build 1331820) cluster (with VMware vCenter Server 5.5.0 build-1476327) and one esxi 6.7.0u3 host didn't found any evidence of problems.

[jburen]

With this suggested configuration you lose HA and you will use an unsupported version of ESXi. Personally I would not use this as my production environment.

[mlocatster]

Hello jburen,

Thank you for the advices.

For the esxi 5.5 version you are right, it's unsupported but unfortunatelly a full migration it's not feasible yet for us.

As I will keep completely separated virtual machines, except residing in the same datastore, inside 5.5 cluster and 6.7 host (that will be probably in future inserted in a different 6.7 cluster, but for now we well only keep VMs with no HA needings on 6.7 host) I want to ask you a clarification. Do you think this will break current HA on 5.5 cluster or do you meant that you cannot have HA between 5.5 and 6.7 hosts?

Thank you

Matteo

[jburen · Accepted solution]

You will have no HA on that single 6.7 host. HA on the 5.5 cluster will not change.