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MICDROP
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What is mean "VMFS Resignaturing" ?

Hi all,

I planning upgrade esx 4.0 to esxi 6.7 ( maybe I should upgrade it through 5.5 .. )

Because esx 4 uses VMFS3 and ESXi 6.7 not support VMFS 3, I must upgrade VMFS 3 to VMFS 5.

I referred to this KB, and when I mount VMFS3 to ESXi, it is automatically upgraded to VMFS5.

However, case of below, upgrade will be failed.

  • When you mount the VMFS3 datastore after its resignaturing, it does not upgrade to VMFS5. You must perform the upgrade manually.

I will try to eliminate the possibility of an upgrade failure, but what does resignature mean?

Will the VMFS 3 datastore be automatically upgraded to VMFS 5 when it is mounted on ESXi 5.5 or later?

Thank you in advance for your advice.

Regards.

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amohammadimir
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Since ESXi 5.5 still supports VMFS3, the upgrade to from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 for the ESXi 5.x can be done either via command-line or via vSphere Client.

In ESXi 6.7 because it no longer supports VMFS3 datastores. The ESXi host automatically upgrades VMFS3 to VMFS5 at the first boot after an upgrade to ESXi 6.7 or later, when the host mounts all discovered VMFS3 datastores.

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped.

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amohammadimir
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Each VMFS datastore has a unique identifier (UUID).When you attempt to mount a device that contains a VMFS datastore copy/storage snapshot, you have an option of mounting with its original UUID or changing the UUID to re-signature the datastore.

Besides that VMware® vSphere® VMFS-5 Upgrade Considerations might be useful to take a look.

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmfs-5_upgrade_considera...

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loungehostmaste
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when you have that terrible old stuff like 4.0 you *really* should migrate to a new storage and if it's temporary something like NFS on a cheap hp microserver, after that you can cleanly format your storage with the newest VMFS and then migrate the running guests back

MICDROP
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Thank you for your reply.

Doesn't the migration to ESXi 5.5 automatically upgrade VMFS to 5?

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amohammadimir
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Since ESXi 5.5 still supports VMFS3, the upgrade to from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 for the ESXi 5.x can be done either via command-line or via vSphere Client.

In ESXi 6.7 because it no longer supports VMFS3 datastores. The ESXi host automatically upgrades VMFS3 to VMFS5 at the first boot after an upgrade to ESXi 6.7 or later, when the host mounts all discovered VMFS3 datastores.

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped.