Attempt to upgrade datastore from VMFS3 to VMFS5 fails

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When you attempt to upgrade a shared VMFS3 datastore to VMFS5 on an ESXi 5.0 host, the upgrade fails.

You see the following error message:

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to Upgrade Filesystem: Device or resource busy

This issue may occur when the hosts that can access the shared VMFS3 datastore that you are upgrading include hosts running ESX/ESXi version 4.x or earlier.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0

Resolution

Because legacy hosts do not support VMFS5, to avoid this issue, make sure that all hosts accessing the datastore are upgraded to ESXi version 5.0.

Note: This issue may also happen to any other host that is not ESXi 5.0 and has the same volume mounted either in the same cluster or in a different cluster, managed by same/different vCenter server, which was ignored/overlooked during the troubleshooting. In certain situations, you can remove the volume from that ESXi host or upgrade the volume to resolve the issue.