#ASR 6405E 128MB SAS VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 UPGRADE#
#ASR 6405E 128MB SAS VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 SOFTWARE#

Most companies want to test new file systems first, and so VMware played it safe and defaulted to VMFS-5 for storage that still works with it even though 512n works perfectly fine with VMFS-6.

512n has been around for a long time and works great with VMFS-5. The main reason for this was that VMFS-6 was version that was required for 512e (4kn). FlashArray storage is 512n, so my automatic datastores are all VMFS-5 in vSphere 6.5: But one subtle thing that has changed between 6.5 and 6.7 around all of this is the VMFS version defaults.ДЄs I mentioned before, unless the storage was 512e, the default would be VMFS-5. So your question might be now, okay so this doesnвЂ™t really mean anything to me. Is that if you have SAN storage with 4K sector size, it is supported, but it will not show up with 4Kn SWE, but instead 512e. My understanding though, and certainly verify this with VMware/your storage vendor.

Third party multi-pathing plugins are not supported with 4Kn.

4Kn SSD, NVMe, and RDM to VMs are not supported.

Booting ESXi from 4Kn drives requires UEFI boot, not traditional BIOS.

Only local SAS, SATA HDDs are supported.

Support for this storage is still somewhat limited: In other words, VMDKs still report back a sector size of 512 bytes, even if the storage below is 4K.

#ASR 6405E 128MB SAS VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 SOFTWARE#

In other words, a software emulation layer exists so applications and VMs that need or were designed for 512 sector size and continue to run. This means вЂњ4 KB native Software EmulatedвЂќ. In vSphere 6.7, support has been extended to 4K storage, so that now it shows up as 4Kn SWE for its sector size. Storage that has 512 byte sectors would show up as 512n (512-byte native). In vSphere 6.5, 4K storage would be listed as sector format of 512e (512-byte emulated). There wasnвЂ™t direct support for 4k native storage yet in ESXi, but VMFS-6 was setup for it. VMFS-6 introduced support for storage that has 4K sector sizeвЂ“the main change is that all metadata on VMFS-6 would be aligned to 4K boundaries. The reason for this, or at least the explanation for the behavior has to do with the storage sector size. This of course was a bit annoying for many.

#ASR 6405E 128MB SAS VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 UPGRADE#

Furthermore, there is no upgrade path besides deleting the file system and then reformatting with VMFS-6. The issue with this was that VMFS-5, was well not VMFS-6. So when you installed ESXi, the default datastore that gets created would be VMFS-5. ESXi (unless told otherwise) would default to formatting some storage with VMFS-5. A behavior that many noted was that it was not always the default option for their storage. In vSphere 6.5, a new version of VMFS was introducedвЂ“VMFS-6.

Asr-6405e 128mb sas vmware vsphere 6.5