Mysql – Migrate Jira to MySql – Unknown system variable ‘storage_engine’

I'm trying to setup Jira on a vm.
I want to move from the embedded H2 database to my own mysql database.

I'm currently running mysql 5.7.x on ubuntu 16.04. However when I try to connect Jira with this server I get the following error message:

Unknown system variable 'storage_engine'

I already tried a number of things to fix this. First off in my mysql.cnf file I added default-storage-engine = InnoDB This didn't do anything for the error.

On my Jira vm I went into /opt/atlassian/jira/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/database-defaults

and changed it to

databaseUrl=jdbc:mysql://localhost/jira?autoReconnect=true&characterEncoding=utf8&useUnicode=true&sessionVariables=default-storage-engine=InnoDB

as well as

databaseUrl=jdbc:mysql://localhost/jira?autoReconnect=true&characterEncoding=utf8&useUnicode=true

Again nothing changed for the error.
I also went into the dbconfig.xml file and removed the sessionVariables=storage-engine=InnoDB part from the url. Again this didn't change anything.

I've also tried changing it to sessionVariables=default-storage-engine=InnoDB

Again no luck.

Does anyone have an idea how to get it to work? I don't want to create another sql setup just to run sql 5.6.x to be honest. I hope someone knows the solution to this.