I tried adding a new NFS datastore to my vCenter 6.7, however the GUI would not let me enter the full name and I had to truncate it by 1 character. From what I can read on various pages (https://williamlam.com/2021/04/updated-character-limits-for-vsphere-objects.html) it seems that 80 characters is the limit, but I'm only allowed to use 42.
I then tried to rename my datastore via the GUI to the full name and again was limited to 42 characters. However, I already have 2 datastores in the cluster with 43 characters.
I tried from the CLI:
#vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/rename <42-character-name> <43-character-name>
The command completed successfully however the datastore name did not change.
I then tried the old syntax:
ln -sf $(readlink -f /vmfs/volumes/<42-character-name>) /vmfs/volumes/<43-character-name>
Which worked.
So what is the "official" datastore naming character limit and why does the CLI allow more characters than the GUI?
Thanks.
