Datastore Cluster Requirements

Datastores and hosts that are associated with a datastore cluster must meet certain requirements to use datastore cluster features successfully.

Follow these guidelines when you create a datastore cluster.

• Datastore clusters must contain similar or interchangeable datastores.

  A datastore cluster can contain a mix of datastores with different sizes and I/O capacities, and can be from different arrays and vendors. However, the following types of datastores cannot coexist in a datastore cluster.

  • NFS and VMFS datastores cannot be combined in the same datastore cluster.
  • Replicated datastores cannot be combined with non-replicated datastores in the same Storage-DRS-enabled datastore cluster.
• All hosts attached to the datastores in a datastore cluster must be ESXi 5.0 and later. If datastores in the datastore cluster are connected to ESX/ESXi 4.x and earlier hosts, Storage DRS does not run.
• Datastores shared across multiple data centers cannot be included in a datastore cluster.
• As a best practice, do not include datastores that have hardware acceleration enabled in the same datastore cluster as datastores that do not have hardware acceleration enabled. Datastores in a datastore cluster must be homogeneous to guarantee hardware acceleration-supported behavior.