Upgrade to VMFS5

[agianna]

Hello,

is it safe to upgrade a store from VMFS 3,46 to 5?

May i leave turned on  VMs running on this store ? Any impacts?

Just some informations: the datastore i'd like to upgrade is 1,8 TB and  i have 2 hosts  both ESXi 5.5, configured as cluster.

Thanks to all

[schepp]

Hi,

yes you can do a live upgrade while there are VMs running on that datastore.

All hosts connected to that datastore must be running vSphere 5 though, as ESXi 4 host can not manage VMFS 5 datastores.

Also keep in mind that a fresh formatted VMFS 5 datastore has a 1 MB blocksize, while an upgrade datastore keeps it's preconfigured blocksize. Having datastores with mixed blocksized impact the speed of storage vMotion processes.

So if you have the space to do it, I would migrate the VMs to another datastore, delete the old one and format a fresh VMFS 5.

Regards

[admin]

Hello,

yep rightly said by schepp

Yes it is safe to upgrade from VMFS3 to VMFS 5 with running VM's, But if you do an upgrade the VM's will still retain the existing block size and they will not move to the 1MB block size.

Also find the Document explains the VMFS5 considerations and advantages,

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMFS-5_Upgrade_Considerations.pdf