Tape backups and Windows 2012 deduplication

[mpjs]

Hi

Not sure if this has been discussed in any of the forums; I have an idea around leveraging Veeam B&R and Windows Server 2012 deduplication to reduce the amount of Tape required to backup virtual machines for B2T jobs. My experience since starting virtual machine backups with B&R is that the backups are larger compared to the conventional (old) way of backing up files at guest OS level or in guest with agents etc. This said even with the deduplication and compression technologies available today. Because of the growth in backup sizes (for virtual machine backups) the tape requirement becomes more which prompted me to think of the following idea. I haven't tested this and would just like to get some comment on it - not sure if this is good practice at all.

Remember the idea here is to reduce the amount of tape required to archive VM backups to tape.

I was thinking of the following scenario:
Create a VM running Server 2012 (VM name: xx-dedup01) with the deduplication feature enabled and add to the Backup Infrastructure as a Repository Server
Configure jobs to backup VMs to the above mentioned repository server, give it some time for deduplication to reduce the backup file size
Configure another job to backup the VM called xx-dedup01 and store the backup of this VM on another repository that don't have Server 2012 deduplication enabled and don't configure deduplication or compression for this job.
Create a backup to tape job that will backup the repository where the xx-dedup01 backup files are stored

Is this worth investigating and are there any risks associated with restoring the data (that's obviously the most important aspect.)


Regards

[foggy]

Note that deduplication inside repository VM will change a lot of blocks making incremental backups of this VM huge. Apart from the fact that storing backups inside VM is not considered as best practice).