Backing up Win2012 VM's that have dedup volumes?

[briggs]

Hi,
We are still not quite there yet (6 months later!) with our migration to Windows 2012 R2, but we should be all sorted by the new year.
At the moment, the main files servers are 2003, with compression on the volumes.
On our new 2012 servers, the same data will reside on a new server, but the volumes will have dedup enabled. We will probably only run the dedup operations at the weekend (we may change to nightly, I don't know until it's in).
My question is, what do we need to do with our Veeam server to ensure our backups work exactly as they do now? I understand as long as I add the dedup role onto our Veeam server (2012 itself) it will still enable file level restores? I don't need to actually run any dedup on the Veeam servers volumes?
The repository is just a NAS box, the veeam server writes to a CIFS share on the NAS, and the NAS box knows nothing about dedup at all, so I assume the backup jobs on Veeam should have the same settings as the current 2003 servers? Or do I need to alter the advanced settings?

TIA for any tips!
Alan

[foggy]

Alan, just enabling deduplication on the Veeam B&R server will allow for file-level restores from deduplicated volumes. Be ready for large increments in case of in-guest deduplication enabled, since it seriously affects the number of changed blocks.

[briggs]

Foggy, thanks for confirming that.
I've been doing some digging, and what you mention regarding the size of the incrementals is a massive concern, given what I've read.

Is anyone doing this? ie. backing up a live file server that has dedup enabled?

If so, how are you handling this? Some of the articles I've read suggest the re-hydrated data that would get backed up during an incremental, could equal the size of the entire server (the full backup). This is worse case, but where my daily incrementals are currently 20GB, they could be as large as the full - 850GB! Is this really a possibility? I can't possibly retain any more than a week or two's worth of backups if that is the case!

Any comments from people actually doing this, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Alan

[foggy]

Yes, depending on the data pattern inside guest OS, the incremental size could easily equal to the full. Btw, here's another topic on that.