vSphere Storage - ESXi 5.1 - Documentation - VMware

When upgrading the datastore, use the following command: vmkfstools -T|-upgradevmfs
/vmfs/volumes/UUID
NOTE All hosts accessing the datastore must support VMFS5 . If any ESX/ESXi host version 4.x or earlier is
using the VMFS3 datastore, the upgrade fails and the host's mac address is displayed. with the Mac address
details of the Host which is actively using the Datastore
Virtual Disk Options
Virtual disk options allow you to set up, migrate, and manage virtual disks stored in VMFS and NFS file
systems. You can also perform most of these tasks through the vSphere Client or the vSphere Web Client.
Supported Disk Formats
When you create or clone a virtual disk, you can use the -d --diskformat suboption to specify the format for
the disk.
Choose from the following formats:
n zeroedthick (default) – Space required for the virtual disk is allocated during creation. Any data remaining
on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first
write from the virtual machine. The virtual machine does not read stale data from disk.
n eagerzeroedthick – Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to
zeroedthick format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out during creation. It might take
much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks.
n thin – Thin-provisioned virtual disk. Unlike with the thick format, space required for the virtual disk is
not allocated during creation, but is supplied, zeroed out, on demand at a later time.
n rdm:device – Virtual compatibility mode raw disk mapping.
n rdmp:device – Physical compatibility mode (pass-through) raw disk mapping.
n 2gbsparse – A sparse disk with 2GB maximum extent size. You can use disks in this format with hosted
VMware products, such as VMware Fusion, Player, Server, or Workstation. However, you cannot power
on sparse disk on an ESXi host unless you first re-import the disk with vmkfstools in a compatible format,
such as thick or thin.
See “Migrate Virtual Machines Between Different VMware Products,” on page 261.
NFS Disk Formats
The only disk formats you can use for NFS are thin, thick, zeroedthick and 2gbsparse.
Thick, zeroedthick and thin formats usually behave the same because the NFS server and not the ESXi host
determines the allocation policy. The default allocation policy on most NFS servers is thin. However, on NFS
servers that support Storage APIs - Array Integration, you can create virtual disks in zeroedthick format. The
reserve space operation enables NFS servers to allocate and guarantee space.
For more information on array integration APIs, see Chapter 21, “Storage Hardware Acceleration,” on
page 215.
Creating a Virtual Disk
Use the vmkfstools command to create a virtual disk.
-c --createvirtualdisk size[kK|mM|gG]
-a --adaptertype [buslogic|lsilogic|ide|lsisas|pvscsi] srcfile
-d --diskformat [thin|zeroedthick|eagerzeroedthick]
Chapter 25 Using vmkfstools
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