Hello all. Is Branchache supported on shares from an ReFS file system?

We have a small file server running Server Essentials 2012 R2 and everything works quite well except we cannot seem to get the Branchcache feature activated for our shares from our ReFS based file shares. In server manager, the option to enable Branchcache on the shares is grayed out (but not so for any shares from an NTFS partition). And if we try to enable Branchcache from the Advanced Sharing tab from the share's properties, we get the error "An error occured while trying to modify share XXX. The request is not supported.". The Branchcache role is installed for the server.

Thank you.

Hi,

Did you use the Group Policy or Local Computer Policy to enable BranchCache?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127252.aspx

Regards.

Vivian, yes all the GP's appear correct. I created a test share from an NTFS mount from which I can enable Branchcache and we have verified that it is working correctly with our remote office. Seems odd that I'm unable to enable Branchcache on REFS mounts which is where all of our project files are located.

Hi,

Sorry for the delay reply.

There is no MS article to describe about this issue.

While ReFS may appear to have some similarity to NTFS, it does not contain all the underlying NTFS features and scales efficiently to handle data sets far larger than NTFS.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/01/02/windows-server-2012-does-refs-replace-ntfs-when-should-i-use-it.aspx

I am not sure if this related.

Regards.

Apologies for reopening an old thread but I've had the same issue with Branchcache and ReFS.  After logging an official job with Microsoft support the response has been.

"I have a check on our internal database and found one internal KB that says its not supported. "

Functionality	NTFS	ReFS
OBJECT IDs	Yes	No
Usable with Branch Cache	Yes	No (Needs Object ID)

Unfortunately I do not know the internal KB but at least it is an official "not supported" notice from MS.  I wish they'd write something into their BranchCache documentation to state that it is only supported on NTFS volumes however as we now have Terabytes of data to move back from ReFS to NTFS if we want to implement this solution.

Chris