Recently I got the following question from my customer:
Can I mount a datastore formatted under vSphere 6.0 to the vSphere 5.1 or 5.5 host?
I answered: yes, it should work fine because there is the same major version of VMFS but I needed to confirm it, it's me 🙂 I have not able to find any information about it so I decided to check it. vSphere 6.0 introduced VMFS version 5.61 and for a quick reminder we can meet the following VMFS 5 versions:
vSphere 5.5 - 5.60
vSphere 5.1 - 5.58
vSphere 5.0 - 5.54
I could not find any changelog about difference between above versions 🙁
I did a quick test and created a small datastore under vSphere 6.0 and later mounted it to vSphere 5.5 U2. It worked without any problems:
To check VMFS version from the ESXi CLI, please use vmkfstools --queryfs -h /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name 🙂 Of course, you can also check via GUI (Web Client or vSphere Client), however I prefer CLI 😛
You can not use any tool to upgrade/convert VMFS 5.54-5.60 to 5.61. If you use vmkfstools -T you will get the following error:
/vmfs/volumes/xxxxxx with version 5 cannot be upgraded.
Error: Operations not supported
To upgrade VMFS 5.60 to 5.61 you need reformat datastore manually, but for what? 🙂
If you still use VMFS 3, you can use the above command to upgrade the datastore to VMFS 5.
Update 12.2016: vSphere 6.5 introduced a new version of VMFS - 6. If you want to upgrade datastore to VMFS 6, you need to re-format it.