New Veeam Storage Server

[nunciate]

I am looking for a little advice here. I have been reading through posts but finally decided it would be easier to just ask.

Our current storage is old so we purchased a new system to perform our backups too. We settled on a new HP Apollo 4150. It has 40 - 6Tb drives in it. It also has 6 - 500Gb High Speed SSD drives to use as HP SmartCache drives.
I feel like this will provide the performance and capacity we need however I am not 100% sure what version of Windows I want to go with.

Our current backup posture is to do Active Full backups weekly and daily incremental on almost every server we have. The only exceptions are some very large file servers where we only do Weekly Synthetic full backups with reverse incremental.
The current repository server is running Windows 2012 R2 and we deduplicate all the drives which saves a ton of space. As a matter of fact there is no way I could run all the active full backups we do without deduplication turned on.

So my question is this. Should I go with Windows 2016 and REFS Partitions or should I stick with 2012 R2. It is my understanding that REFS does not support deduplication so I assume I would have to convert all of my backup jobs to weekly synthetic full backups and probably use reverse incremental on those as well. Otherwise, I would run out of space on my repositories.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has a lot of experience with Windows 2016 and a large number of backups.
I would also like to confirm that the REFS issues that I have seen reported here have actually been resolved.

[DaveWatkins]

ReFS does block cloning, so it has a built in form of dedup. It's not real dedup but it will help, it basically makes synthetic full backups take no space.

However, while most people are now fine with ReFS, it's not completely solved, and you'll want a lot of memory in the repository server (at a guess for your data size I'd say 96-128GB).

You may also want to look at 2016 with NTFS and dedup. The latest patch supposedly fixed the final issues with dedup on 2016 so that opens up switching to ReFS later once it stabilizes fully without an OS reinstall.

Why do you say you'd have to reverse incremental? As far as I'm aware there isn't any significant space savings in doing so and the recommended is forward incremental

[nunciate]

Good point. I will go ahead and deploy 2016 since I can always update to REFS later.
I only used reverse incremental on the existing few jobs because it was setup that way a long time back and I just never changed it.
I probably won't use it after the upgrade.

[mkretzer]

According to Veeam newsletter the Dedup/NTFS bug in 2016 is only fixed in NEXT patchday!