Veeam Backup And Replication Free Edition with Windows 2012 DeDuplication

I have always been a fan of DeDuplication, but other than an Ubuntu based BackupPC, haven’t taken advantage of it. Now that it’s available in Windows 2012, I figured I should give it a good shot for Full VM Backups. Prior to this, my method was to get a full backup of the ESXi VMWare Virtual Machine using Trilead VM Explorer then zip it up. With the switchover from VMWare to HyperV I wanted a more efficient process.

Enter Veeam Backup & Replication combined with Windows 2012 DeDuplication. I am actually running Veeam Backup & Replication on a Windows 7 HyperV Virtual Machine and the drive is on a different Windows 2012 server shared out using SMB.

Here are the notes from Veeam regarding the different methods which I’ll be testing.

Testing Deduplication

• Backups are 3 Full Windows 2003 Web VM’s. They add up to 181GB in Windows Explorer
• None compression level is recommended if you use storage devices with hardware compression and deduplication tools to store created VeeamZIP files.
• Dedupe-friendly is an optimized compression level for very low CPU usage. It is recommended if you want to decrease the load on the Veeam backup server (for VMware environments) and source Hyper-V host (for Hyper-V environments).
• Optimal (default setting) is the recommended compression level providing the best ratio between the size of the VeeamZIP file and time of its creation.
• High compression level provides additional 10% compression ratio over Optimal, but at the cost of about 8x CPU usage.

• Extreme compression provides the smallest size of the VeeamZIP file but reduces the VeeamZIP job performance. We recommend that you run backup proxies on computers with modern multi-core CPUs (6 cores recommended) if you intend to use the extreme compression.

Test Procedure

1. The process included making Veeam backups using the 4 different methods
2. Get a Screenshot of the disk properties to see current disk usage
3. Run the Optimize process on the 2012 Server ( Start-DedupJob –Volume D: –Type Optimization )
4. Check Status of Dedup ( Get-DedupJob )
5. Get a screenshot of the disk properties to see current disk usage
6. Get the Deduplication Rate and Deduplication from the Windows 2012 Server after refreshing the disk volumes in Server Manager
7. Delete all the backups
8. Run Data Scrubbing Jobs ( Start-DedupJob D: –Type Scrubbing -full )
9. Empty the trash ( Start-DedupJob D: –Type GarbageCollection -full )
10. Keep checking on the scrub status with this command (Get-DedupStatus | Format-List)
11. Also check on it with ( Get-DedupJob)

Results

 In Production

Here is an image that shows how well DeDuplication can work. The process of unzipping all of these VM’s takes a while not only to unzip, but allow the deduplication process time to work.

Here is how you can tell when the DeDuplication process is running.

Additional Images