REFS and Spanned Volumes

[skumflum]

Hi,

Does anyone know if spanned volume and REFS is supported or will break REFS Block Cloning when adding a new spanned volume?

Thank you

[DaStivi]

Hi, i can tell you that refs is working perfectly well with spanned volumes... though its not supported from veeam and either from Microsoft... basically what microsoft told me is that windows dynamic disks are deprecated since server 2000 or something.. and so because of that refs is not got tested with dynamic discs and spanned or striped volumes, hence no support...

technically refs filesystem sits above the windows dynamic disks and doesn't recognize whats gooing on on the disks, this is why it work...

microsoft told me also that i should use storage spaces instead -> dynamic disks are unsecure, storage spaces not..
but basically the main reason for spanned volumes and refs could be a netapp with its 16TB "Filesize" Limit, because of that a LUN thats mounted to a backup server can only be 16TB... -> ah netapps LUN, actually 1 disk that the microsoft server sees is a File on a RAID-DP volume.. so not issues when 1 disk break because of the raid behind the single disk-file is redunant too!

if you really think of using single physical drives and span with dynamic disks... don't do it!