ESXi

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  • 1.  VMFS-4 on ESXi 5 and RDM

    Posted Oct 26, 2011 09:39 PM

    Hi, I have two ESXi 4.1 hosts and I just introduced an ESXi 5 host to the mix (iSCSI SAN).  All hosts can see all LUN's.  I wanted to test presenting a new 4TB physical RDM LUN to an exisiting VM, but when I try to do so, I get the message "Mappings for LUNs with capacity greater than 2TB can be stored on VMFS5 datastores only"

    1. Do I need to upgrade the ESXi 4.1 hosts first?
    2. Will upgrading convert the iSCSI VMFS-4 datastores to VMFS-5?
    3. Will it hurt anything to have the VMFS-4 datastores presented an ESXi 5 host
    4. Just to clarify, physical RDM disks over 2TB are now supported in ESXi 5 - correct?

    Thank you for your assistance.  I'm about to purchase VMware Essentianl by the way.



  • 2.  RE: VMFS-4 on ESXi 5 and RDM
    Best Answer

    Posted Oct 26, 2011 09:45 PM

    Do I need to upgrade the ESXi 4.1 hosts first?

         - No - you could do this with the existing configuration, but the VM would be limited to running on just the ESXi 5 host.  You would have to create a new datastore, present it to the ESXi 5 host and create a vmfs5 datastore.

    Will upgrading convert the iSCSI VMFS-4 datastores to VMFS-5?

         - No - upgrading is a manual step you perform on the datastore.

    Will it hurt anything to have the VMFS-4 datastores presented an ESXi 5 host

         - There's no problem doing this.   If the VM stays at hardware version 7 you can run the VM on either ESXi 4 or 5.  Once you upgrade the hardware version for the VM it can only run on the ESXi 5 host.

    Just to clarify, physical RDM disks over 2TB are now supported in ESXi 5 - correct?

           - Yes - physical RDMs and datastores can exceed 2 TB.   Virtual disks and virtual RDMs are limited still to 2 TB.



  • 3.  RE: VMFS-4 on ESXi 5 and RDM

    Posted Oct 27, 2011 01:41 AM

    So to accomplish adding the 4TB RDM to the VM, in this case I would need to either create a new datastore from the ESXi 5 host, then move the exisitng VM over to it, or upgrade the existing VMFS-4 datastores to VMFS-5 (knowing they can only run on ESXi 5) .... is this correct?  Thanks!



  • 4.  RE: VMFS-4 on ESXi 5 and RDM

    Posted Oct 27, 2011 07:04 AM

    Yes, VMFS-5 is only supported with ESXi 5.0 hosts.

    Btw. There is no VMFS-4. It's either VMFS-3 or VMFS-5.

    André