NTFS or ReFS for HyperV

[Guest Guest]

Due to $reasons we’re relocating our server room over the next few days.

 

As part of this our current rack servers are being replaced with towers due to lack of space for a rack.

 

I’ve been Googling re NTFS vs ReFS for the VM storage and seen some horror stories regarding ReFS and others recommending its use.

 

Does anyone have experience of using ReFS with HyperV and non shared storage (we’ll be using two standalone hosts)

 

I appreciate this may seem very rushed, however, due to issues currently in school this has got to be done yesterday

Edited January 16, 2024 by Guest

[Steve21]

From my understanding unless you're using the fancy aspects like storage spaces (or specifically for backups/large storage sets) etc there is no major benefit to it currently. You then also need to consider whether you can "officially" support it, as it requires server catalog hardware to be fully supported similar to storage space direct etc

 

Even if you check Microsoft's own scenarios for it (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview#supported-deployments) it's basically Storage Spaces, Backups and basic disks (that have software that implement their own software resiliency and availability solutions)

 

In terms of the horror stories, that was earlier REFS I would say it's a lot better now in terms of reliability

 

Steve

[Jawloms]

I run all mine on ReFS and have never had any problems. 5 hosts each with around 3 VMs on.

[Alastairb25]

I use Storage spaces and went with ReFS 2 hosts both with DAS and around 6-7 VM's on each.

 

We did some performance testing at the time with general file copies and Crystal and it did seem faster