Upgrading from VMFS 5 to VMFS 6
Unlike the previous VMFS upgrade, there is no method to perform an in-place upgrade of a VMFS 5 volume to VMFS 6. As per VMware, this is due to the changes done to the structure of VMFS metadata to make compatible with 4K alignment. In this recipe, we will provide you with a high-level overview to migrate your workload to VMFS 6.
How to do it...
The following high-level procedure will help you host all your VM workload on VMFS 6 volumes:
- Make an inventory of all your datastores and their current utilization.
- Now, depending on the amount of free space available in the storage array, you can choose to create LUNs of the same size as the existing datastores or create a set of larger LUNs to temporarily migrate the VMs onto them.
- Once the datastores have been created, use storage vMotion to migrate the VM data on the datastores.
- If you have created larger temporary LUNs, then select one or more datastores in batches, migrate VM data off of them, delete the empty VMFS...
