Rebuilding Environment from 5.1 to 6.5 will all drives be accessible?

[MarkVRware]

I am rebuilding a vSphere 5.1 environment to 6.5.  I will be doing an upgrade will be shutting each host down individually rebuilding it to 6.5 and then adding to the 6.5 vCenter.  The 5.1 environment has a direct attached storage area network all drives are shared between all four hosts obviously. My question is when I upgrade a host to 6.5 will the storage need to be upgraded at that time or can I keep it in a state where it can be read by both the 5.1 environment and the 6.5 environment?

Has anybody done this?

[rcporto]

If you're talking about upgrade the VMFS version of your datastores, you should keep them at the same version during the upgrade... and after upgrade all your hosts to version 6.5, I recommend you consider you move to VMFS version 6, see the comparison: http://vsphere-land.com/news/a-comparison-of-vmfs5-vmfs6-in-vsphere-6-5.html

[MarkVRware]

This is very interesting that they didn't put the VMFS6 into the sphere until 6.5 and not in 6.

One point, I have already built my vCenter to 6.5 which I do not want to have to rebuild back to version 6. You know any problems with the Center 6.5 managing the vSphere 6 hosts and temporarily managing 5.1 hosts?

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

The big problem here is that vCenter 6.5 cannot manage vSphere ESXi host at version 5.1, so if you want add your ESXi 5.1 hosts to your vCenter 6.5, you will need to upgrade your hosts first to version 5.5, see: VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes

[MarkVRware]

OK, Thank you very much Richardson for pointing me the right direction!