vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 1: VMFS-5

Welcome to the first in a series of posts related to new storage enhancements in vSphere 5.1. The first of these posts will concentrate on VMFS. There are two major enhancements to VMFS-5 in the vSphere 5.1 release. VMFS File Sharing Limits Increase Prior to vSphere 5.1, the maximum number of ESXi hosts which could share a read-only file on a VMFS filesystem was 8. This was a limiting factor for those products and features which used linked clones. Linked Clones are simply “read/write” snapshots of a “master or parent” desktop image. In particular, it was a limitation for vCloud…