Upgrading datastores to VMFS-5
With vSphere 5, VMware upgraded the VMFS file system to version 5. VMFS-5 came with the following new features:
Unified 1 MB file block size
Large single extent volumes of 64 TB
Smaller 8 KB sub-block
Small file support
Increased file count limit greater than 120,000
VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
Primitive Atomic Test & Set (ATS)
Enhancement for file locking
GUID Partition Table (GPT)
A new starting sector of 2048
If you upgraded your vSphere environment from version 4 or earlier to version 5 or 6, your datastores are probably still on VMFS-3. There are two options for going to VMFS-5. The first option is to create new VMFS-5 datastores and move your virtual machines to the new datastores. When your old VMFS-3 datastores are empty, you can remove them. The advantage of this method is that the new datastores will have all of the new VMFS-5 features. However, it is a lot of work, and you need enough free space on your storage system to create...
