0x8056530b error enabling disk deduplication on Windows Server 2012 R2 Volume - any ideas why or how to fix?

Question

I'm getting the following error when trying to enable disk de-duplication on a volume on my Windows 2012 R2 file server.  The error is:
"There was an error updating Data Deduplication on volume: MSFT_DedupVolume.Volume='\\?\Volume{8dfc4322-9997-11e3-93f5-005056a84b9b}\' - HRESULT 0x8056530b, The specified volume type is not supported. Deduplication is supported on fixed, write-enabled
NTFS data volumes and CSV backed by NTFS data volumes."
The volume in question is a 1TB VMFS volume mounted to the virtual machine that is the Windows file server.  I could find no info anywhere that references this error as it relates to a standard mounted volume or VMware or VMFS. 
Any ideas on what could be the problem or how to fix it?  I could find nothing in the log files other than an entry which is basically a repeat of the error above.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
- ADEHART
P.S. This is a volume that was previously mounted on an older Windows 2003 server.  Not sure if that may make a difference.

Answer 1

have you compared this issue to the ones that are successful and compared what is different?
Have you made sure of the following:
Servers
See the following list for server requirements for deduplication:
• Server hardware should meet the minimum requirements for running Windows Server 2012. The deduplication feature was designed to support minimal configurations such as a single processor system with 4 GB of RAM and one SATA hard disk drive.
• If you plan to support deduplication on multiple volumes on the same server, you need to plan an appropriately size for the system to ensure that it can process the data. The general rule is that the server needs 1 CPU-core and 350 MB of free memory to run a deduplication job on a single volume, and that job can process about 100 GB per hour or around 2 TB per day. Deduplication scales with additional CPU core processors and available memory to enable parallel processing of multiple volumes.
For example: If you have a server with 16 CPU core processors and 16 GB of memory, deduplication uses 25% of the system memory in the default Background Processing mode, and in this case, that would be 4 GB. If you divide by 350 MB, you can calculate that the server could process about 11 volumes at a time. If you add 8 GB of memory, the system could process 17 volumes at a time. If you set an optimization job to run in Throughput mode, the system will use up to 50% of the system’s memory for the optimization job.
• Data Deduplication supports up to 90 volumes at a time; however, deduplication can simultaneously process one volume per physical CPU core processor plus one. Hyper-threading does not impact this because only physical core processors can be used to process a volume. A system with 16 CPU core processors and 90 volumes will process 17 volumes at a time until all 90 volumes are done, if there is sufficient memory.
• Virtual server instances should follow the same guidance as physical hardware regarding server resources.
Volumes
Volumes that are candidates for deduplication must conform to the following requirements:
• Must not be a system or boot volume. Deduplication is not supported on operating system volumes.
• Can be partitioned as a master boot record (MBR) or a GUID Partition Table (GPT), and must be formatted using the NTFS file system.
• Can reside on shared storage, such as storage that uses a Fibre Channel or an SAS array, or when an iSCSI SAN and Windows Failover Clustering is fully supported.
• Do not rely on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs). You can access data if a deduplication-enabled volume is converted to a CSV, but you cannot continue to process files for deduplication.
• Do not rely on the Microsoft Resilient File System (ReFS).
• Can’t be larger than 64 TB in size.
• Must be exposed to the operating system as non-removable drives. Remotely-mapped drives are not supported.
Note
Files with extended attributes, encrypted files, files smaller than 32 KB, and reparse point files are not processed by deduplication.