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.

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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.

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NFS and VMFS datastores cannot be combined in the same datastore cluster.

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Replicated datastores cannot be combined with non-replicated datastores in the same Storage-DRS-enabled datastore cluster.

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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.

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Datastores shared across multiple datacenters cannot be included in a datastore cluster.

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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.