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MillardJK
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Enthusiast

How to determine the difference between VMFS5 datastore types.

If you've been keeping track of the upgrade discussions for vSphere 5, you know that ESXi v5 will support VMFS-3 and VMFS-5 datastores, but the recommendation is to move to VMFS-5 to gain a number of the benefits in vSphere 5.

You've also seen that you can upgrade a VMFS-3 datastore to VMFS-5, but at the cost of some differences:

  • VMFS-3 block size will be maintained (newly-created VMFS-5 datastores are 1MB, with no option to modify)
  • 64K sub-blocks instead of 8K
  • 30K file limit instead of >100K

Additional differences:

  • Upgraded datastores will continue to use MFT partition table, at least until the volume exceeds 2TB
  • Upgraded datastore is aligned at sector 128 instead of 2048.

(see http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/07/21/vmfs-5-vmfs-3-whats-the-deal/ if you want more info)

So the primary way to tell if a VMFS-5 datastore was upgraded or created new is the block size: if it's anything but 1MB, it must be upgraded.

But what if you upgrade a 1MB-blocksize VMFS-3 partition? Other than inspecting the datastore with some other sort of tool (support console, alternative host mount), how can you see the partition alignment or the partition table type, in order to determine whether the datastore was created or upgraded? Or is there another, better way to readily discern that a VMFS-5 datastore was upgraded or created new?

——
Jim Millard
Kansas City, MO USA
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11satya
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hear is the link

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/2tb-vmdks-on-upgraded-vmfs-3-to-vmfs-5-really.html

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