Nutanix AHV / Veeam Proxy for Nutanix and Windows File Server with Dedupe

[Voltron]

I'm curious if anyone knows of any caveats to having a clustered pair of Windows (MSCS) file servers under Nutanix AHV with running Windows native deduplication on the file volume side of things when it comes to backing it up and restoring files through Nutanix proxy and/or Windows Agent?

Thanks!

[HYF_JE]

So **my** understanding is that the majority of what Veeam does is *block based*. AHV backups are included in that.

In theory, this means that because your data will be deduplicated already by Windows, Veeam will be....shall we say....less than optimal when it attempts (with defaults) to dedup and compress the blocks in a given backup RP. That's not a "real issue" but here are some caveats:

* The AHV product to my knowledge at time of writing (v4) does not permit administrators to modify the compression and dedup settings to be less or more aggressive. Normally the recommendation would be to create a new job with just your VMs with the Windows dedup within that job, and then configure the job settings to be less aggressive on compression and dedup as to not waste CPU and RAM deduping/compressing already optimized data.

* From a file level recovery perspective, there are some caveats to Windows native dedup but I won't talk about that here, it's well documented in many other places.

Honestly these days I'm more privy to not do OS-level dedup and just let the storage system handle it because the storage brains will have a more "holistic" view of the entire data pool and be able to dedup across the entire pool. Or better yet, avoid duplication in the first place.