Windows 2012 Deduplication and Hyper-V

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Windows 2012 Deduplication 08

A couple a months ago I kicked XenServer out of my lab and replaced it with Hyper-V as explained in details in the blog post Goodbye XenServer Welcome Hyper-V 2012.

In this blog post I’m gonna show you how Windows 2012 Deduplication saved me 78% (204GB) on my already expensive Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SSD without spending a dime.

First off I checked the free space on my SSD data disk on my Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Server.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 01

Then I enabled the Windows 2012 Deduplication Server Role through Server Manager.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 02

Data Deduplication cannot be enabled on a System drive so make sure you use a small and cheap SSD for the OS or simply use an old spare laptop SATA disk to keep your machine dead silent. If you have limited numbers of SATA 6GB/s ports, just put the OS on a SATA 3GB/s port.

Right Click the volume and select to Configure Data Deduplication.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 03

Now select General purpose file server and set Deduplicate files older than to 0. In Windows 2012 R2 we got a new option for VDI which are covered in details in this Microsoft blog post.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 04

WARNING: Make sure to select Deduplication Schedule and disable Background Optimization. Windows 2012 Deduplication doesn’t support deduplication of running VM’s and will break them!

Windows 2012 Deduplication 05

Since we have disabled the deduplication schedule we need to shut down all running VM’s on the host and start the Windows 2012 Deduplication job manually.

Run the following PowerShell command.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 06

You can also check the status through Resource Monitor.

Windows 2012 Deduplication 07

My deduplication job ran for less than 2 hours and gave me 78% more disk space. Awesome. Another great reason for running Windows 2012 R2 and Hyper-V.

Want to save even more space? Check the blog post How To Reduce Storage with 80-95% by leveraging App-V and Shared Content Store as recommended by Microsoft in the whitepaper App-V 5.0 and Citrix Integration Overview.

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6 thoughts on “Windows 2012 Deduplication and Hyper-V”

  1. Nice post Trond Eirik Haavarstein, after following your guidance i have saved my 106GB space in 320GB. I am sure your article going to be famous just because everyone looking to save his/her space in hard disk.

    Reply
  2. Good post! I realizing a very useful information from here that will be helpful to me for my data storage problem.

    Reply
  3. I just downloaded the Hyper-V server 2012 R2 edition. This is just the hypervisor. So there is no role de-duplication possibility. Is there a manual way to add this fileserver role with de-ducplication feature?

    Reply

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