Disk space is allocated in 512-byte sectors to form logical blocks. VxFS supports logical block sizes of 1024, 2048, 4096, and 8192 bytes. The default block size is 1K for file system sizes of up to 1 TB, and 8K for file system sizes 1 TB or larger.

An extent is defined as one or more adjacent blocks of data within the file system. An extent is presented as an address-length pair, which identifies the starting block address and the length of the extent (in file system or logical blocks). VxFS allocates storage in groups of extents rather than a block at a time.

Extents allow disk I/O to take place in units of multiple blocks if storage is allocated in consecutive blocks. For sequential I/O, multiple block operations are considerably faster than block-at-a-time operations; almost all disk drives accept I/O operations of multiple blocks.

Extent allocation only slightly alters the interpretation of addressed blocks from the inode structure compared to block based inodes. A VxFS inode references 10 direct extents, each of which are pairs of starting block addresses and lengths in blocks.

The VxFS inode supports different types of extents, namely ext4 and typed. Inodes with ext4 extents also point to two indirect address extents, which contain the addresses of first and second extents:

Each indirect address extent is 8K long and contains 2048 entries. All indirect data extents for a file must be the same size; this size is set when the first indirect data extent is allocated and stored in the inode. Directory inodes always use an 8K indirect data extent size. By default, regular file inodes also use an 8K indirect data extent size that can be altered with vxtunefs; these inodes allocate the indirect data extents in clusters to simulate larger extents.