
#Vmware vsphere 6.5 support free
Initially, 128 journal blocks (256 MB in size in total) are allocated, and the journal resource file is extended when a number of free journal resource blocks drops below a threshold of 64. Note that the journal resource file can also be dynamically extended. Tracking journal blocks separately in a new resource file reduces the risk of issues arising due to journal blocks being interpreted as regular file blocks. This new mechanism was introduced to address journal issues on previous versions of VMFS, due to the use of regular files blocks as journal blocks and vice-versa. The journal block is released when the host closes the volume. jbc.sf. Each time a VMFS-6 volume is opened, the relevant host allocates a journal block on that volume for itself. In VMFS-6, journal blocks are tracked in a separate system resource file called. The previous version of VMFS used journal resource blocks allocated as regular file blocks (1MB in size). That way, VMFS-6 can support millions of files / pointer blocks/sub blocks (as long as volume has free space).

If the filesystem exhausts any sub-blocks / pointer blocks/file descriptors, the respective system resource file is extended to create additional resources. This means that they may show a much smaller size than observed with previous versions of VMFS, but will grow over time. jbc.sf) are extended dynamically for VMFS-6. But of course, for larger volumes, we will extend the system resources are needed. The reason is to cap the initial resources is to save on the disk space used by these resources. If this value turns out to be greater than 16384, we cap the initial number of resources to 16384. The reasoning behind this is to initially create enough resources to avoid frequent resource file extensions. If this value turns out to be less than 16384, 16384 resources are automatically created. pointer blocks, sub-blocks, file descriptors) is set to (RESOURCE_PER_TB_FOR_VMFS5 * VOL_SIZE_IN_TB). When formatting a VMFS-6 volume, the number of system resources (e.g. Swap files are always thickly provisioned. This is especially true with swap file creation so long as the swap file can be created with all LFBs. These enhancements should result in much faster file creation times. For the portion of the thick disk which does not fit into an LFB, SFBs are allocated. Thick disks created on VMFS-6 are allocated LFBs as much as possible. Thin disks created on VMFS-6 are initially backed with SFBs.

While the SFB size can range from 64KB to 1MB for future use-cases, VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 is utilizing an SFB size of 1MB only. VMFS-6 introduces two new block sizes, referred to as small file block (SFB) and large file block (LFB). File System Resource Management File Block Format

This means that VMFS-6 is ready to fully support the new, larger capacity, 4KN sector disk drives when vSphere supports them. Sector ReadinessĪs part of future-proofing, all metadata on VMFS-6 is aligned on 4KB blocks. In this section, some of the new features and characteristics of this new file system are explored. VMFS-6 is the new filesystem version that is included with the vSphere 6.5 release. These drives are now supported on vSphere 6.5 for VMFS and RDM (Raw Device Mappings).

These drives will have a physical sector size of 4K but the logical sector size of 512 bytes and are called 512e drives. Given that legacy applications and operating systems may not be able to support 4KN drives, the storage industry has proposed an intermediate step to support legacy applications by providing 4K sector size drives in 512 emulation (512e) mode. These AF drives allow disk drive vendors to build high capacity drives which also provide better performance, efficient space utilization, and improved reliability and error correction capability. To address this issue, the storage industry has proposed a new Advanced Format (AF) drives which use a 4K native sector size. The storage industry is hitting capacity limits with 512N (native) sector size used currently in rotating storage media. However, there is still a LUN connectivity limit that needs to be considered, so if host-to-LUN connectivity limits increase in future releases of vSphere, VMFS will also be able to support increases host connectivity. With improvements to the heartbeat metadata area on VMFS-6, there is now support for up to 1,000 hosts connecting to the same datastore. This is a two-fold increase from previous versions of ESXi where the number of devices supported per host was limited to 256. DevicesĮSXi hosts running version 6.5 can now support up to 512 devices. This is an increase from the 1024 paths that were supported in previous versions of vSphere. ESXi hosts running version 6.5 can now support up to 2,000 paths in total.
