Subscriber Discussion

Has Anyone Used Refs Filesystems For Vmses?

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Mike Dotson
•Mar 01, 2017
Formerly of Seneca • IPVMU Certified

A recent internal discussion asked the question about what filesystems are supported by the various VMS's.  On the Windows side we usually see NTFS.

It was brought up because a customer asked about ReFS which was a new filesystem available in Server2012.

Resilient File System (ReFS), codenamed "Protogon", is a Microsoft proprietary file system introduced with Windows Server 2012 with the intent of becoming the "next generation" file system after NTFS.

It has support for built in recovery and very large volume support.   Out of curiosity I found a Microsoft comparison about it here ReFS vs NTFS

Has anyone heard of this filesystem being supported in any VMS?

Has anyone tried using it?

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
•Mar 01, 2017

No, but it would be interesting to hear of someone trying it.  It does seem like it is inevitable that 5 years down the road we will be forced to use it due to volume size limits on NTFs.  Either that or making a bunch of separate partitions.

BD
Bert Duyck
•Jul 08, 2017

I just formatted a disk as ReFS and network optix does recognised the disk.
It seems to be working fine.

 

(1)
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Josh Hendricks
•Jul 10, 2017
Milestone Systems
In reply to Bert Duyck

That makes sense. I can't comment on Milestone, but in general I don't think most software vendors are using proprietary filesystem features. There's limited value in doing so, and very high risk of locking yourself into a single filesystem.

For Windows-based applications, as long as you utilize .NET or the basic API's provided by the language, the specifics of the filesystem are abstracted away and are essentially irrelevant.

As long as you're not taking advantage of these features of NTFS at the application level, it's probably safe to try ReFS:

The following features are unavailable on ReFS at this time:

Functionality ReFS NTFS
File system compression No Yes
File system encryption No Yes
Data Deduplication No Yes
Transactions No Yes
Hard links No Yes
Object IDs No Yes
Short names No Yes
Extended attributes No Yes
Disk quotas No Yes
Bootable No Yes
Supported on removable media No Yes
NTFS storage tiers No Yes

source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview

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