Okay, let's get this party started.
I'm on a Windows Server 2022 box named localmem1,
and I want to start by opening an administrative PowerShell session,
and letting you know if you do want to go further with SMB Direct,
first of all, make sure that your network adapter supports RDMA.
You can access the cmdlet Get‑NetAdapterRdma,
and that'll give you an interface by interface breakdown of
whether the feature is enabled and operational,
and you'll want to make sure that it's operational.
In my case, even if I enable it,
it's not going to be available because I'm in a Hyper‑V
virtual machine as I previously mentioned.
There is a related command to turn that enabled flag on or off.
Let me do a help Set‑NetAdapterRdma, and if we look at examples,
as you can see here, let me highlight it,
you can just do Set‑NetAdapterRdma, the name of the adapter,
which you can get from get, and then Enable this to True,
as simple as that.
Okay, so in terms of NTFS, and REFS, and data deduplication,
we actually covered a lot of this in a previous module,
but let's do it again.
In Server Manager, we can come into, let's again start from scratch,
come down to File and Storage Services,
make sure we're focused on the right server if you have more than one in there,
and we'll go over to storage pools,
and we can adjust virtual disks in a storage pool
context here by right‑clicking,
and we can extend the virtual disk and look at its properties,
and this isn't really allowing us to change all that much.
Come to the Storage Pools area first, and to review,
I have a single storage pool created that includes two physical disks,
and I've created a virtual disk called project‑disk1.
Now,
if you're wondering how could we enable data deduplication if we
didn't do it when we created the virtual disk,
I'll cover that in a second, but first,
let me show you the workflow when you're creating a
new storage spaces virtual disk.
We'll go Tasks, New Virtual Disk, I'll select the Pool,
click OK, and then in the wizard,
I'm going to give this one a name called data‑dedup,
really imaginative, right, click Next, Next.
In this case, I'm going to do Mirror,
and I'll make it a simple two‑way mirror that uses thin provisioning,
and the size is going to be 10 GB, click Next,
and then Create.
I'm going to ensure that create a volume when this wizard closes is enabled,
and then we'll click Close, and then we'll create a new volume,
again, specifying the server and the disk in the list,
click Next.
I'll use all the space, I'll accept the default drive letter,
and I'll give it the name dedup.
For file system, again, notice that you can choose when you format.
I'm going to choose ReFS in this case, click Next,
and now we have our data deduplication.
So the options here are disabled, file server, VDI, or virtualized backup.
I explained the difference among these previously,
and when you make a choice here, there'll be some slightly different UI,
but not really.
I'm going to just do general purpose file server,
and then we specify deduplicate files that are older than,
and then we specify a target.
Three is the default, and then we can make some exclusions,
file extensions that we do not want to deduplicate.
That's going to be a comma‑separated array,
and then we can click Set Deduplication Schedule to allow
the job to run in the background or not,
and then we can create one or more schedules.
We also provide a maintenance window, a time that the job should complete within.
Let's click OK to finish that, Next, and Create,
and we can see that Enable deduplication and configure
deduplication are in the tasks list.
Now as I was saying a moment ago though,
in this view, that is in the Storage Spaces view,
when you right‑click a disk, there is no indication about data deduplication.
You actually have to go up here to volumes,
and then for the volume in question, you'll see what I mean in just a second.
There is our dedup.
We already have it enabled there,
but we can right‑click Configure Data Deduplication,
but for a volume that we do not have dedup enabled on yet,
we can do the same thing.
Right‑click, Configure Data Deduplication,
and it brings us to that very same interface that we saw before.
So I'll choose my mode, my older than, my extensions,
my extension exclusions, set a schedule,
it looks like it's picking up the defaults from my previous choice,
and then OK to put that into effect. That's all there is to it in terms of data deduplication.