What about the common problem we, Windows systems administrators,
face in terms of our file servers having so much wasted or
dead space due to duplicate file storage.
That's a pain, isn't it?
You may have all of your users home folders.
Just think of all of the same copies of reports,
PowerPoint files that weigh in several megabytes in size,
meeting recordings that are hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes in
size being redundantly stored on these servers.
What can we do about it?
Well,
we've got a built‑in feature that's been in Windows server
for a long time called data deduplication,
which offers a space savings without sacrificing access performance,
and in the Microsoft docs, you can see some numbers,
they say that user documents,
you can get a 30 to 50% space savings on your file servers,
for virtual hard disks, in other words, for your Hyper‑V VMs,
80 to 95% savings, and then for your binaries,
your deployment shares, 70 to 80% saving.
So you see here that we can do data dedupe not only on user files,
but on binary files as well.
What happens?
Well, in a data dedupe job, when the operating system senses that two artifacts,
two files are exactly the same through check summing,
only one of those will be kept, and then pointers will be internally
maintained to wherever that file is referenced on your volume.
There are a few different contexts that you can choose from when
you turn on data deduplication for a disk,
for a virtual disk or volume.
One is the file server context where you're going to work,
like I mentioned a moment ago, home folders work folders,
software development shares.
Another context is virtual desktop infrastructure.
This is the VHD, or the virtual machine virtual hard disk context.
And then we have the backup context, how you can optimize your backup snapshots by applying deduplication.