Windows Server 2012 Data Deduplication Part 1 ~ Tech Notes

Introduction

Data growth it is one of the key area that we need to face every year especially on the end of the year or during the time when we would like to do maintenance. We need to clear some space to allocate the available disk space to store some important data. But we are not sure whether those file are needed. Deleting might be not an option in some cases. But how about purchasing a new storage?. This sound good to the storage provider, but do you think that you can do the same every year?. What if Microsoft does give this feature as a free feature?. Anyway you are going to invest on the Microsoft Windows Servers license, and you will get this part of the operating system. Don't you see this is really awesome!!!!.

Look at the improvement result below with Microsoft Windows Server 2012.

Configuration

1)On this lab, what I have created is to use the storage spaces that I have created In my earlier presentation. I have created another 2 virtual disk inside the drive E with the capacity of 8GB each

2)As you can see here, 2 vhd have been created.

3)If you are new to powershell and not sure where the button is. It is not too late to learn. The powershell can be activated by clicking on the icon as the arrow shown in the slight. After we have launch the powershell, we need to install the dedup feature. If you prefer to install this using server manager , you can do that as well. But on this demo I will you how to use powershell. The first thing is to import the module by typing

a)Import-module servermanager

b)add-windowsfeature -name fs-data-deduplication

4)To know more about the available command you can use the command help dedup.

5)As till here, you have learn how to install the data deduplication feature, now we need to enable the feature on a specific volume which is the drive E. To enable the dedup just follow the screen.

6)After we have enable the dedup on the volume, we must configure some policy as a baseline when the files should be compressed. I will use 0 days in this example.

7)To start the compression, you must the command “ start-dedupjob e: -type optimization”. It will take some time during the compression.

8)If you would like to check the status , you can always use the command get-dedupjob, but if there isn't any job, you will see none.

9)Of course end of the day, you will like to know, how much disk space that you have safe from it, you can use the command get-dedupstatus to see the compression ratio.

10)Instead of the powershell, you also can check this under the server manager as well. What we have is, the dedup saving we have is about 99%. What do you expect the available disk space on the drive E?. Getting excited?