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.