Can ESXi 4.1 not read storage formatted by ESXi 5.1?

[rightfoot]

I am not sure that this is the case but I installed a bladecenter chassis with hs21 blades and some fibre channels store. I then installed esxi 5.1 onto the first blade and it works just fine.

However, I cannot install any blade which already has say 4.1 on it because it never sees the storage. I then installed a blade and installed esxi 4.1 while that blade was connected to the same storage as esxi 5.1 but when I try to add new storage, I get the following error;

Call "HostDataStoreSystem.QueryVmfsDataStoreCreateOptions" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "x.x.x.x" failed.

There is also an error which says that the storage is blank which it is not since the first hs21 is using it as I type this.

[schepp · Accepted solution]

Hey,

ESXi5 will create VMFS 5 by default, which can not be used by ESXi4. It can only use VMFS3.

During creation of a datastore, you can also choose to create it as VMFS3 on an ESXi5 host as well though.

Regards

[rightfoot]

At least I know now. Thanks very much.