Implementing & Testing Windows Server 2012: Deduplication

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Microsoft have introduced deduplication as a standard feature into Windows Server 2012, I’m pretty excited about this, as it brings an enterprise feature set to SMB.

We are going to test deduplication which is part of the File Server role, before we do this what is deduplication and how will it benefit us?

Well deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. In most environments you often find large amounts of data which are repeated, think about documents that you work on and click File Save As after a small change.

Within Windows Server 2012 is a little tool called DDPEval.exe which is located in the \Windows\System32\ directory. This tool will go away and calculate expected space savings from using deduplication. We are going to use this to calculate our estimated space savings and then see how this compares to the actual savings.

With this in mind, what data are we going to pop onto the Windows Server 2012 File Server?

General – 2,347 Files consisting of 266 Folders and equating to 9.29GB of data. This is made up of your everyday Office 2010 documents, some PDF’s and JPEG’s, the usual files you find on most servers.

PDF – 562 Files consisting of 48 Folders equating to 660MB of data. These are all PDF’s

Pictures – 360 Files equating to 1.21GB of data. These are JPEGs

These files are my own, and I think I’m pretty good at not duplicating files, so I’m interested in knowing how much space we will save.

Read more here