Several versions of the VMFS file system have been released since its introduction. VMFS6 is the latest VMware File System version that was introduced with the release of vSphere 6.5 with few enhancements as compared to VMFS5.
In this short post, let's discuss about the new features introduced in VMFS6 and some of the major differences between the two.
VMFS 5 and VMFS 6 can coexist. However, due to the changes done in VMFS 6 metadata structures to make it 4K aligned, you cannot inline/offline upgrade from VMFS5 to VMFS6. To leverage the VMFS6 capabilities, you’ll have to create new VMFS6 datastores, then migrate your workload from VMFS5 to VMFS6 by using Storage vMotion.
What's new in VMFS6
1. Automatic Space Reclamation -
It allows storage arrays to reclaim deleted or unmapped disk blocks from a VMFS datastore so it can be used elsewhere. vSphere 6.5 automatically perform this task in the background after every 12 hours with minimal effect on storage I/O.
2. Support for 4K Native Drives in 512e mode -
The new format allows 4kB sectors instead of the common 512 bytes per sector.
3. Default SE Sparse
VMFS5 uses SE Sparse only when VMDK size is greater than 2 TB, If VMDK size is less than 2 TB, VMFS 5 uses VMFSsparse. However with VMFS6 the default format is SESparse.
Comparing VMFS5 and VMFS6
Image Courtesy - VMware
I hope you'll find this post informative.
Thank you for reading !
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