[SOLVED] Veeam 9.5 not detecting REFS volume

[dgomes]

TLDR: wasted whole afternoon because of windows update. Thanks microsoft

EDIT: Please disregard. It seems there are some windows updates that must do something for this issue. My colleague just called me as I posted this message and informed me after running updates and reformatting the iscsi volume, Veeam is behaving as it should.
So just leaving this information here for anyone who runs into this unusual issue.

I'm currently trying to test the new REFS functions from 9.5 on server 2016 but having some issues.
Our lab setup for this is as follow:

Fresh install of server 2016 datacenter on a VMWare 6.0U2 host.
10 TB volume on a Synology NAS presented to Windows directly via iSCSI (bypassing vmware).
Synology block size is 64K and so is our REFS block size when formatting.

We tried both a direct partition (windows disk manager -> format REFS), as well as creating a storage space with the single volume also formatted REFS.

Veeam 9.5 sees the storage fine but the 2 big signs that REFS is not being detected properly are being shown:
1) the "align blocks" option is NOT ticked and greyed out
2) when completing the setup of the repo, it says "specified volume does nto support fast cloning API. proceed anyways?"

The veeam install is on a trial licence so I think everything is unlocked, though I think the REFS functions work on every version?

Is there something wrong in this setup?

Thanks,

[Mike Resseler]

David,

Thanks for sharing (including the solution which will most probably help others). One of the items you do must know (I ran against it this week...) is that when you are creating a repository (even if it is ReFS and fully supported) that the checkbox is indeed not ticked and greyed out. It becomes like that AFTER you create the repository. But yes, the second step (the one with the warning "specified volume does not and so on...) should indeed be the indication for that.

Thanks
Mike

[lesterclayton]

Just wanted to add that I've also run into this issue, but Windows Updates did not fix it for me. My server was 2012 R2 with some huge ReFS volumes for repositories, and we reinstalled the OS. I got the abovementioned error, but simply deleting the ReFS volumes and re-creating them made the errors go away. I suspect that this feature it's looking for is only enabled in the newer formatted ReFS volumes, and not volumes formatted with the earlier version of ReFS.

[foggy]

That's correct, it should be a freshly formatted volume and repository should be re-created so that Veeam B&R could recognize ReFS 3.1 and use the benefits it provides.