5.6.2.1 vSAN Disk Format
For vSAN with vSphere 6.0 and later, the disk format has been upgraded. The following configurations are now available.
Table 3. On-Disk File Format Version
vSAN Version | Format Type | On-Disk Version | Overhead | Supported Hosts |
5.5 / 6.0 | VMFS-L | v1 | 750 MB per disk | ESXi 5.5 U1+ |
6.0 | VirstoFS | v2 | 1% of physical disk capacity | ESXi 6.0+ |
6.2 | VirstoFS | v3 | 1% of physical disk capacity | ESXi 6.0 U2 + |
The newer on-disk versions are not supported on older ESXi hosts. For example, with vSAN 5.5 v2, on-disk versioning is not supported.
The recommendation is to use the VirstoFS (v3) format unless there are backward compatibility concerns for the cluster. This configuration provides the broadest set of features available with vSAN.