ESXi Device Sector Formats 2023-10-24 虚拟化 暂无评论 1621 次阅读 #512-Byte Native Format ESXi supports traditional 512n storage devices that use a native 512-bytes sector size. #512-Byte Emulation Format Due to the increasing demand for larger capacities, the storage industry has introduced advanced formats, such as 512-byte emulation, or 512e. 512e is the advanced format in which the physical sector size is 4096 bytes, but the logical sector emulates 512-bytes sector size. Storage devices that use the 512e format can support legacy applications and guest operating systems. These devices serve as an intermediate step to 4Kn sector drives. #4K Native Format with Software Emulation Another advanced format that ESXi supports is the 4Kn sector technology. In the 4Kn devices, both physical and logical sectors are 4096 bytes (4 KiB) in length. The device does not have an emulation layer, but exposes its 4Kn physical sector size directly to ESXi. ESXi detects and registers the 4Kn devices and automatically emulates them as 512e. The device is presented to upper layers in ESXi as 512e. But the guest operating systems always see it as a 512n device. You can continue using existing VMs with legacy guest OSes and applications on the host with the 4Kn devices. When you use 4Kn devices, the following considerations apply: ESXi supports only local 4Kn SAS and SATA HDDs. ESXi does not support 4Kn SSD and NVMe devices, or 4Kn devices as RDMs. ESXi can boot only from a 4Kn device with UEFI. You can use the 4Kn device to configure a coredump partition and coredump file. Only the NMP plug-in can claim the 4Kn devices. You cannot use the HPP to claim these devices. With vSAN, you can use only the 4Kn capacity HDDs for vSAN Hybrid Arrays. For information, see the Administering VMware vSAN documentation. Due to the software emulation layer, the performance of the 4Kn devices depends on the alignment of the I/Os. For best performance, run workloads that issue mostly 4K aligned I/Os. Workloads accessing the emulated 4Kn device directly using scatter-gather I/O (SGIO) must issue I/Os compatible with the 512e disk. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-5E7B4EBC-2147-42F9-9CCD-B63315EE1C52.html 标签: esxi 本作品采用 知识共享署名-相同方式共享 4.0 国际许可协议 进行许可。