:4TheLuvofSharePoint – Ivan Sanders

This is another post based on migrating the functions of a few of my Servers to Windows Server 2012. Another favorite features even better than DHCP Failover is Data De-Duplication.

Data deduplication optimizes the file data on the volume by performing the following steps:

1. Segment the data in each file into small variable-sized chunks.
2. Identify duplicate chunks.
3. Maintain a single copy of each chunk.
4. Compress the chunks.
5. Replace redundant copies of each chunk with a reference to a single copy.
6. Replace each file with a reparse point containing references to its data chunks.

I assume everyone is familiar with Server Manager in Windows server 2012, Click on Server Manager from the lower left of your task bar, then click on File and Storage services

Then Click on Volumes and one of the issues you notice immediately is the disk space savings if you have enabled data deduplication. I am saving 856GB out of 3258GB total space for a 26% savings and I am rounding down the benefit. I would think I might say it looks like you have another 465GB for 3723GB. well one of the rules is you should not deduplicate data on you Boot Partition and there are a few more that I will either mention later in this post or provide the reference on TechNet for your review and use.

Prior to walking through the 4 or 5 steps to enable Data Deduplication in the next post, there are a couple of issues that you need to be aware of, Data deduplication Requirements:

Data deduplication is supported only on the following:

1. 1. Windows Server operating systems beginning with Windows Server 2012 with NTFS data volumes

Deduplication is not supported on:

• 1. System or boot volumes
• 2. Remote mapped or remote mounted drives
• 3. Cluster shared volumes (CSV) (but it does support clustered configuration with NTFS volumes)

Deduplication skips over the following files:

• 1. System/ state files
• 2. Encrypted files
• 3. Files with extended attributes
• 4. Files whose size is less than 32 KB
• 5. Reparse points (that are not data deduplication reparse points)

2. Best Practices:
3. 1. Exclude your Virtual Server Volumes from Data Deduplication
4. 2. Always perform a full backup before and after the first time you run data deduplication on a volume.
5. 3. Schedule backups to be performed after your scheduled Garbage collection due to the number of changes that occur in the chunk-store during Garbage Collection
6. 4. By default Garbage Collection, is configured to run weekly

Note: using data deduplication on SSDs has not had any effect on the SSDs.

1. Requirements for Drive removal for use in other systems, if keeping the data on the drive
2. 1. The OS is Windows server 2012 
3. 2. You have configured Data deduplication on the new system.
4. 3. OR, You have removed data deduplication from the drive prior to moving the drive to a platform that does not support Data deduplication

Note: as mentioned above to get the drives to work without the documents / files having the appearance of corruption when you attempt to open them on the new system, you will to install and configure data duplication on the new system .prior to moving the drives to the new systems What this means is that you would need to remove data deduplication from the volume prior to installing the drive in ANY Operating System that is MOT Windows Server 2012, this includes Windows 8, I have been attempting to get Data deduplication on my Laptop and it would ne awesome if any of you have done so, I enjoy hearing the step’s you took to get data deduplication to work ion Windows 8

-Ivan

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