Veeam 9.5 and ReFS Scenarios

[HJAdams123]

Hello and Good Day Veeam Community...

So I have been doing some reading on Refs on Windows 2016 and Veeam 9.5, and indeed, its a game changer. But I want to account for all of the situations where ReFs and its block cloning feature would benefit a backup job in both performance, as well as the space you take up on disk on the Windows 2016 Repository. So the big one I hear about all the time is the ability to do Synthetic fulls, super fast, and very little space taken relatively speaking. But what other type of operations benefit from ReFS?

1. Do periodic Active Fulls benefit from ReFS on Veeam 9.5?

2. Do backup Incremental Merge processes complete faster? (Say a situation where you do a incremental backup, and you only do 30 restore points. Its the process where on the 31 backup, the last incremental has to be merged into your full)

3. Do Reverse Incremental backup performance increase? (the the backup time get faster when the last incremental has to be removed from the full, as well as new changes merged into the full, making your latest backup always a full)

And the last question, is there any inter job cloning that can happen? What I mean is, two jobs that backup different virtual machines, but there is alot of blocks between the virtual machines that are the same. If both jobs use the same Windows 2016 repository, the same ReFs volume on that repository, can there be some benefit from both jobs if they are encountering shared blocks? (or are the performance and storage gains limited to the data in one job only, regardless if they right to the same repository?

Thanks in advance everyone, eager to hear your take and experiences....

-Harold

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Harold,
1) No, only syntetic processing benefit from the block cloning.
2) Yes, instead of reading and writing data it will only change pointers within ReFS. Very important is that you use 64KB formating for ReFS for good performance.
3) Yes, it will save 2/3 of the IOs at backup target and run those as block cloning.
Last question: This is not a deduplication technology, only synthetic processes within a backup chain can profit from it.

[HJAdams123]

Thanks Andreas, I think that answers all my questions....

-Harold