Benefits of Windows Server 2019

[christopher-swe]

Hi,

Are there any benefits of using Windows Server 2019 for Veeam Backup & Replication/Proxy/Storage instead of Windows Server 2016?

[HannesK]

Hello,
today I would say the best argument is "compatibility with the future". Example: you run Active Directory 2019 / any feature that changed from 2016 to 2019 where we use libraries from the OS.

I run almost all of my lab on Windows 2019 but it seems to be not really "final code" to me.

Best regards,
Hannes

[mkretzer]

Two words: update speed.
Try it out: Updates that took half an hour with windows server 2016 now are finished in 1-2 minutes!

[Mike Resseler]

I would say... ReFS as a repository...

Especially the new tools that are there to do checking on how it is doing. For those who are running 2019 with ReFS as a repository, check the tool ReFSUtil.exe

"Refsutil salvage -QA <source volume> <working directory> <target directory> <options>"

[mkretzer]

Yea, and then finally i would know if our windows 2019 REFS issues with deletes are ours alone...

So everyone should upgrade (sorry)...

To be fair: Everything else runs extremly well with 2019. And the new parameter "RefsDisableAsyncDelete" seems to help quite a bit!

[christopher-swe]

Thanks for all the great replies!

[soehl]

Yea, and then finally i would know if our windows 2019 REFS issues with deletes are ours alone...

So everyone should upgrade (sorry)...

To be fair: Everything else runs extremly well with 2019. And the new parameter "RefsDisableAsyncDelete" seems to help quite a bit!

Have you some more informations about "RefsDisableAsyncDelete"?! We run a couple of Windows 2019 Repositories and have sometimes os crashes in the backup window.

[mkretzer]

Hello soehl,

no, nothing. We have a case with MS for weeks now. They ask me a new question every 2 weeks or so and then go silent again. Last time they asked if we have set one of the knows REFS settings or if we have set "RefsDisableAsyncDelete". I told them no and asked what exactly they do. No answer.
After a week or so i told them that we are going to set this if they do not answer. No response.

But since today i know this setting does not really solve the issue: Deletes do really no longer run asynchronously, but since Veeam deletes as fast as it can without pause backups still stall quite a bit, at least after the system runs 3-4 days and memory usage is up to 300 GB or so. Only good thing: when the deletes are done IO speed recovers faster.

@gostev: Is there any way to "slow down" deletes (pause between each file)?

[soehl]

Hello mkretzer,

thanks for the information, we have similar problems.
We have not opened a MS case yet, last year I wasted enough time with the MS Support for Windows Server 2016 ReFS troubleshooting.
The April MS updates includes a new refs.sys (10.0.17763.404), maybe this version helps......

[mkretzer]

Hello soehl,

it does not. With the reboot 3 days ago we also tried the new update.

Edit: I just wonder: Was this really fixed with 2016? We had the feeling it was...

[soehl]

Hello mkretzer,

too bad that the update does not fix the problem and yes our repositories with 2016 runs now rock solid.
Sometimes, in high load times, we see some wmi connection problems from our monitoring to the the 2016 repositories, but the main function is stable and there are no crashes.

[mkretzer]

I mean... We never had one crash. But stalled IO... Alot when there are deletes.

[nmdange]

So far I haven't seen any issues on 2019 Refs repos, but I always use either forever forward incremental, or when I use weekly synthetic fulls, I enable the option to transform previous chains into rollbacks. So I never have an entire weeks worth of restore points to delete at once.

[soehl]

We had another unresponsive repository tonight (with the latest MS Patches) and will go back to 2016 with the 2019 repositories in the next days.

[mkretzer]

@soehl Sorry but is that possible? I thought REFS gets auto-upgraded by 2019 and will not work with 2016?

[soehl]

@mkretzer you are right. I forgot, the ReFS auto upgrade mechanism. Now we are on a deadlock.

[Frenchyaz]

yes.
One benefit is being able to do Windows deduplication on ReFS volumes without the need to use server 2016 (1709 build) core for that.
So far so good.

[HannesK]

Windows deduplication on ReFS volumes

does it work for you with good speed on block cloning? other reports in the forum state that block cloning gets extremely slow when using deduplication

[HErceg]

One note regarding WS 2019.It has a bug where hyper-v doesn't shut down VM-s properly.Physical server goes down first, therefore VM are not turned off in time.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo ... rverhyperv

[tomnewman]

We are planning to upgrade our Hyper-V host to 2019 in the next few months.

We currently run B&R on the 2016 host which isn't the best practice so we will be moving it to its own VM. Are there any advantages to running B&R on 2019? Any known issues? Just trying to decide whether to host B&R on a 2016 or 2019 VM

We have a fairly simple environment, single host (14 VMs), local Linux repo with secondary backup to tape.

[HannesK]

merged with the existing topic. I still vote for 2019

[jmmarton]

I always recommended to run the backup server on the highest version of Windows you have running in your environment. In some cases things such as FLR may have issues when the backup server is on an older version than server you are restoring to.

Joe