migrate from 2012 veeam server to 2016

[frankive]

Hi.
We have a Windows Server 2012 with Veeam installed. We also have a JBOD attached with deduplication enabled.

We now want to move (reinstall) with Server 2016.

The question is:
* Will Windows Server 2016 be able to see and handle the data from the 2012 deduplication engine?
* Should we go for 2016 deduplication or Refs bit cloning?

[DGrinev]

Hi Frank,

1. The first question for the Microsoft, but I believe a newer version of Windows shouldn't have any issues with the previously created data.
2. Please keep in mind you should format volume to ReFS and start backups from scratch, that's the major reason to stay with deduplication.
Probably, you will get a bit less space savings with the ReFS, it depends on the data type and so on. On the other hand, you will get better performance for synthetic operations. Thanks!

[Delo123]

It's fine to upgrade from 2012 R2 to 2016. Dedupe will stay in 2012 R2 Version until an dedupe optimize run has completed. This changes the data to 2016 Dedupe. (Data won't be readable on 2012R2 Servers anymore). Other than that, things are fine. We did this with multiple servers and JBODS (over 1PB per JBOD)

[frankive]

we don'y have 2012 R2, only 2012 version of windows server on the production environment. Still no issue to jump to windows server 2016 with dedup?