Upgrading to the VSAN 6.0 on-disk format

Note

If VSAN was initially configured with ESXi 6.0, the on-disk format will already be current and this recipe should not be required.

In 6.0, VSAN uses a new on-disk data format. This new format is generally more efficient and handles certain VM-related activity, such as snapshots, more quickly and efficiently. The new format can also perform better on the same hardware.

For VSAN 5.5 clusters that are upgraded to VSAN 6.0, the on-disk format is not upgraded along with the ESXi version. This operation must be manually invoked after the rest of the vSphere 6.0 upgrades are complete.

This process will involve the migration of data to evacuate disk groups prior to their re-creation in the VSAN 6.0 format and/or the rebuilding of objects. As such, this operation is very I/O-intensive. It may be beneficial to schedule this operation during a period of low cluster I/O demand, such as during a weekend.

In three-node clusters that do not have two or more disk...