Disable compression and deduplication on AHV backup

[ahmad.alsabbah]

Hello,

Is there a way to disable compression and deduplication on AHV backup? A customer is suffering from the backup size on HPE StoreOnce because of Veeam compression. The backup is not being appropriately compressed by StoreOnce.
The “Decompress backup data blocks before storing" check box on the repo did not help comparing to Hyper-v backup for the same workloads.

For the reference, check support case # 05259241 (Already closed)

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

“Decompress backup data blocks before storing"

that's the right checkbox.

I see the case, but no information in it about what you ask here. So I would be interested how exactly did you measure the differences in disk space usage of "the same workloads". I guess that there is a measurement issue. Is it the overall disk space usage on the StoreOnce, or the factor that is shown somewhere (if yes, where)?

The measurement can only work with turned off machines and two empty StoreOnce catalyst stores.

Best regards,
Hannes
PS: I deleted the second post you did, as it was duplicate with this one
PPS: instead of investigating such things, I recommend having a look at XFS (or REFS). It's faster, cheaper and sometimes same disk space usage.

[ahmad.alsabbah]

Hello,

Thanks Hannes. The test was done on the same VM that was copied from VMware to AHV environment. The customer measured the backup size by looking at Backups> Disk > Job Name properties (Backup Size / Deduplication % / Compression %). If that is not the right way to measure it, can we guarantee that “Decompress backup data blocks before storing" check box will do the job and can give the same compression ratio as backing up VMware/Hyper-v environments? This is very important to highlight as we have many customers running on AHV and using deduplication appliances as a backup target.

Currently AHV backup does not support synthetic full backup so I believe that XFS or ReFS will not help unless we utilize backup copy jobs. Please correct me if I am wrong

Best regards,
Ahmad

[HannesK]

Hello,
the size needs to be checked directly on the StoreOnce datastore. There might still be some differences in used space, because we have bitlooker for VMware / Hyper-V. Bitlooker doesn't exist in AHV.

Currently AHV backup does not support synthetic full backup

why would you need synthetic full? As AHV backup also does not support GFS today, I see no use-case for synthetic fulls. Note: the next version will allow synthetic fulls and GFS, so it's just a matter of time.

Best regards,
Hannes

[ahmad.alsabbah]

Hello,

Great to know. Then if we are backing up AHV workloads to a deduplication appliance we should select the “Decompress backup data blocks before storing" check box and consider that BitLocker doesn't exist in AHV which may increase the backup file size.

The customer is asking for GFS on AHV. As a current workaround, we could do the backup job with short-term retention and create a backup copy job for that backup job with the desired GFS retention. Backup copy jobs of Nutanix AHV can use synthetic fulls with FastClone. We did refer to this post: nutanix-ahv-f51/synthetic-full-for-ntx- ... 72353.html

Looking forward to all the upcoming valuable features of V12

Best regards,
Ahmad