In-guest Windows dedupe on VMs

[gingerdazza]

I'm interested to know whether Windows VMs that have Windows deduplication enabled have any impact on Veeam in terms of performance, backups speeds, backup sizes, recovery speeds, etc.? We have some large multi TB VMs that I'm considering enable Windows dedupe on, but want to understand the impact of this on Veeam?

Thanks in advance

[opg70]

Yes, in the sense that dedupe activated in the VM causes lots of changed blocks thus incremental backups can be quite large. So while full backups might be smaller, incremental ones will greatly increase compared to a normal VM.

[gingerdazza]

I'm wondering if disabling the monthly full dedupe garbage collection would avoid much of this block "touching" and reduce backups? See below link

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wi ... rview.aspx

Also, for large volumes it might be worth a single dedupe run to get the files deduped, and then disable regular dedupe processes altogether. This way there's no "block touch" and only new data is not deduplicated.

[foggy]

If it is just monthly, then only the first backup after it is affected.

Also keep in mind that for FLR from such volume you would need Data Deduplication to be enabled on the backup server (or mount server used during the restore).

[gingerdazza]

Will FLR run slower if its dealing with a deduped data set?

[foggy]

Yes, it will most likely will.