Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.40 shows the details pane for a datastore, found on the Coni guration tab for a data-
store in Datastores And Datastore Clusters view. Again, note that the VMFS version is included
in the information provided about that datastore. This view, by the way, is also a great view to
see information about storage capabilities (used by policy-driven storage), the path policy in use,
and whether or not Storage I/O Control is enabled for this datastore. The datastore in Figure 6.40
does have a user-dei ned storage capability assigned and has Storage I/O Control enabled.
Figure 6.40
Among the other
details listed for
a datastore, the
VMFS version is
also included.
Perform the following steps to upgrade a datastore from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5:
1.
Log into the vSphere Web Client, if it isn't already running.
2.
Navigate to the Storage view and select a datastore from the Navigator list.
3.
Select the Manage tab and the Settings subsection.
4.
Under the General area, click the Upgrade To VMFS-5 button.
5.
If you are clear to proceed—meaning that all hosts attached are running at least
ESXi 5.0 and support VMFS-5—a dialog box will appear to that effect. Click OK to start
the upgrade of the datastore.
6.
The VMFS-5 upgrade will start. A task will appear in the Tasks pane for the upgrade;
when the upgrade is complete, the vSphere Web Client will trigger a VMFS rescan on
the attached hosts so that they also recognize that the datastore has been upgraded to
VMFS-5.
After a datastore has been upgraded to VMFS-5, you cannot downgrade it back to VMFS-3.
One Potential Reason Not to Upgrade VMFS- Datastores
Although you can upgrade a VMFS-3 datastore to VMFS-5, the underlying block size of the datastore
does not change. h is means that you could run into situations where Storage vMotion operations
between an upgraded VMFS-3 datastore and a newly created VMFS-5 datastore could be slower
than expected. h is is because vSphere won't take advantage of hardware o oads when the block
sizes are diff erent between the source and destination datastores. For this reason, you might prefer
(and we would recommend) to migrate your VMs off the VMFS-3 datastore and re-create it as a
native VMFS-5 datastore instead of upgrading it.
We'd like to make one i nal note about VMFS versions. You'll note in the screen shot in
Figure 6.40 that the selected datastore is running VMFS 5.60. vSphere 5.5 uses VMFS version
