A very cool new feature within Windows Server 2012 is Data Deduplication. Windows will look on block level to duplicate files and removes this files with pointers to the duplicate files. This can save you a lot of diskspace! Data Deduplication can be enabled on all the volumes of your server, except the boot volume!
By default, Data Deduplication will only deduplicate data that is not changed over the last 30 days. You can change this value to any numbers of days you want. Lets enable Data Deduplication. After enabling Data Deduplication, there are three scheduled tasks available (only vissible through PowerShell).
In my example I’ve copied the Windows Server 2012 ISO three times to my ISO partition. So there are three folder called ISO1, ISO2 and ISO3. All the folder contains exact the same data. So three times the ISO files are around the 10 GB of storage on my disk. Watch the result after enabling this great new feature….do you have any idea?? 😉
1.) Open the Server Manager and enable Data Deduplication on the File and Storage Services server role.
2.) Or open PowerShell and enable this rol
Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature -name FS-Data-Deduplication
3.) Enable Deduplication on the specific volume or volumes
Import-Module Deduplication
Enable-DedupVolume E:
4.) View the new scheduled Deduplication jobs
Get-DedupSchedule
5.) Change the MinimumFileAgeDays value to 0
Set-DedupVolume E: -MinimumFileAgeDays 0
6.) Start the Deduplication jobs manualy
Start-DedupJob E: -Type Optimazation
Start-DedupJob E: -Type GarbageCollection
Start-DedupJob E: -Type Scrubbing
7.) After a few minutes, watch the result!
Get-DedupStatus
How cool is that. Are you also going to enable Data Deduplication? 😉
