What is VMFS3 and VMFS5?

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VMFS 5 is available as part of vSphere 5. VMFS 5 is introduced with lot of performance enhancements. Newly installed ESXi 5 will be formatted with VMFS 5 version but if you have upgraded the ESX 4 or ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5, then datastore version will be VMFS 3 only.

How to upgrade from VMFS5 to VMFS6?

To upgrade:

Perform version check for vCenter Server and all ESX hosts.
Perform version check for ESX server EWSX-1.
Perform all pre checks for free space availability on datastore DS-2.
Ensure that the datastore DS-2 is of VMFS 6 type.
Ensure that the datastore DS-2 is visible from host ESX-1.

When an ESXi 6.7 host mounts a VMFS 3 datastore it will automatically upgrade it to VMFS 5?

An upgraded ESXi host will automatically upgrade VMFS3 storage to VMFS5 when mounting any existing datastores. Consider that at the first boot after the vSphere Host upgrade to 6.7, all discovered VMFS3 datastores get upgraded to VMFS5. This also applies if you manually mount a VMFS3 datastore after the boot.

What is vmfs5?

VMware VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is VMware, Inc.’s clustered file system used by the company’s flagship server virtualization suite, vSphere. It was developed to store virtual machine disk images, including snapshots.

What is the maximum VMDK size supported on a vmfs5 Datastore?

62 TB
The maximum supported VMDK size on an VMFS-5 datastore is increased to 62 TB. However, the maximum supported VMDK size on VMFS-3 is still 2 TB. The maximum supported size of a VMDK on NFS is the lesser of 62 TB and 1% less than the maximum file size supported by the NFS filesystem.

What is SEsparse?

SEsparse is a snapshot format introduced in vSphere 5.5 for large disks, and is the preferred format for all snapshots in vSphere 6.5 and above with VMFS-6. VMware has identified an issue in SEsparse VM snapshots that can cause data inconsistencies.

What is the maximum VMDK size supported on a VMFS-6 datastore?

The maximum virtual disk (VMDK) size is 2 TB minus 512 B for ESXi 5.0 and 5.1. In ESXi 5.5 and later, the size is increased to 62TB. The maximum virtual-mode RDM (vRDM) size is 2 TB minus 512 B for ESXi 5.0 and 5.1. In ESXi 5.5 and later, the size is increased to 62TB.

Does ESXi 7 support VMFS3?

VMFS3 is supported with ESXi 7.0 to store boot configurations only.

Does ESXi 7 support vmfs5?

Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) ESXi 7.0 supports VMFS Versions 5 and 6 for reading and writing.

What is VMFS5?

What is VMFS3 and VMFS5?