Home » VMware » VCP510 » When planning for an upgrade from vSphere4 to vSphere5 what will be the effect of upgrading a 1TB VMFS3 datastore with a 2MB block size to VMFS5?
When planning for an upgrade from vSphere4 to vSphere5 what will be the effect of upgrading a 1TB VMFS3 datastore with a 2MB block size to VMFS5?
A. Thick virtual disks can be expanded to a maximum of 2TB.
B. Thick virtual disks can be expanded to a maximum of 512GB .
C. Thin virtual disks can be expanded to a maximum of 512GB .
D. Thin virtual disks can be expanded to a maximum of 2TB.
Correct Answer: D
Explanation/Reference:
A thin disk can be expanded to a size greater than the VMFS size because it grows to the maximum size, whereas a thick disk is set at that size and cannot be bigger than the VMFS.
When upgrading a VMFS datastore from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5, you can extend a datastore past “2TB minus 512B”. The caveat to upgrading a VMFS-3 datastore to VMFS-5 is that it will inherit the block size properties of the original VMFS-3 datastore.
If you upgrade to VMFS-5 from VMFS-3 then regardless of the block size, VMFS-5 uses double-indirect addressing to cater for large files (up to a size of “2TBminus 512B”) on upgraded VMFS-3 volumes. For example, if the VMDK goes beyond 512 GB it will switch to using double-indirect addressing, which will allow for VMDKs up to “2TB minus 512B”.
