Host-based backup of Microsoft Hyper-V VMs.
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spidermac
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Full Name: Chris McCoy
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Query Regarding Veeam and Windows 2016 Deduplication

Post by spidermac »

Okay, we are running Veeam Backup and Replication 10. Actually just moved to it in March from Yosemite...much different experience...in a good way.

A little about the environment.

Host 1 running Server 2016 is a Hyper V host running the production VMs. Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016
Host 2 catches the Veeam Replicas of the VMs on Host 1
Backup is the Veeam Master Server (sorry if it isn't the right term :P) and we have a Big Silly NAS server connected via iScsi

So what we have going on...we have Veeam application aware replica jobs running several times a day from H1 to H2. Then every night, we back up the replicas to the NAS and once they are written to NAS, we write them to tape. All Different Veeam Jobs.

Also working on "spiffying" up our production environment, and yesterday, I started experimenting with Deduplication, or i guess testing with it. I added the role to a file server on H1, then set up a test directory on one of the volumes and pointed dedup at it. Then I went home and went to sleep.

This morning I came in, and checked the results...and honestly was amazed at the results, much better than I anticipated. So I called and spoke with one of my colleagues in the UK and we discussed it. He was also happy with the space savings...but indicated that Veeam might not like it, and that I should check the Veeam Web page and see what I could find here. He also indicated that my replicas were likely going to get really big if we actually applied this to our DFS, as our DFS on site is 2.4 TB. We did look at the replicas, and the ones taken after the Optimization ran were pretty big, then went back to normal.

Anywho...so I bombed around a bit, found some stuff on Windows 2016 Dedup and Veeam and the problems all seemed to be 2 or 3 years old...and indication that MS had patched the issue, and also most of the problems were with Depud running on the NAS or on the host servers, neither of which I am doing.

So, my questions:

1. Am I good to go, assuming H2 has enough storage to handle the larger replicas from when optimization runs?
2. Any other pitfalls I am not thinking about?

Thanks in advance,
Chris
Egor Yakovlev
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Full Name: Egor Yakovlev
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Re: Query Regarding Veeam and Windows 2016 Deduplication

Post by Egor Yakovlev »

Hi Chris,
Make sure Veeam server is on WS2016 or higher with Deduplication role enabled too, otherwise you will lose File-level Recovery from backed up production deduplicated volumes. You don't need to Deduplicate actual Veeam server volumes, just enable the server role.
/Cheers!
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