Potential New Client question about dedupe at hypervisor lev

[exportgoldman]

Hello Everyone,

I work for a IT provider which has around 100 clients using ShadowProtect on single node HyperV machines, and a few using clusters, which we use DPM for.

We are looking for a better cluster solution, preferably with dedup at the hypervisor level. I have looked at the new Symantec BackupExec dedup but you need to put a agent in each VM for it to be able to use the dedup.

My question is, how does the dedup work with veeam with Hyperv when only backing up from the host? Can it reconise the data in the VM's/VHD's and dedup it? do you get good ratios?

I noticed a few posts with CSV/blue screen problems. Hmmmmmmm. Anyone using HP Lefthand sans with good results?

[Gostev]

Hi Tyler, there is a sticky FAQ topic in the main B&R forum that has the whole section on deduplication, this should cover all your questions. To avoid CSV/blue screen problems, be sure to have v6 Patch 3 installed. Thanks!

[exportgoldman]

I've downloaded and have been playing with your product, and are a little confused how when I setup a continous forever job with synthetic fulls will each minute create a 8MB file with 16KB of data in it as reported by the veeam interface, even though Dedup is set to WAN and compression is on.

why the big files with this mode?

[Gostev]

Haha, perfectly valid question that was never asked by anyone in 5 years

Backup mode has nothing to deal with this, it is how backup files are initialized. Veeam backup file has pretty complex structure - it's not just raw data file, but single instance block storage with support for transactional updates and some level of redundancy. When the new backup file is initialized, it pre-allocates 8 MB and puts the required data structures in place.

Unless you are backing up turned off VM, you will probably never have the size of data in backup smaller than 8 MB anyway, because quiescing the operating system and apps will make more than 8MB of blocks "dirty".

[exportgoldman]

So, does this get transmitted across the wire with the full 8MB, or is it 16KB? It looks like a great product just setting up a trial now. I like how your forums are open, Appassure's forums are closed so you can't see what their problems are without buying it first.. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[Gostev]

Nothing at all gets transmitted, as the backup storage file is created and initialized by the backup repository agent.