Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 R2
After reading a lot of information about Windows Server 2012 R2 I found out that it has a really nice feature if you are into virtualization as much as me. When using virtualization you may have a lot of virtual disks that contain a lot of the same data. For example you have four machines that have an installation of Windows Server 2012.
All together this will take up a lot off disk space. I this situation you could also create a base image and use this base image for every virtual machine. But you will then still have the updates and you will have to maintain the base image.
In Windows Server 2012 you already had the feature off Data Deduplication for File and Storage Servers. What it does is the following: It finds and removes duplication within data on a volume while ensuring that the data remains correct and complete. This makes it possible to store more file data in less space on the volume.
A nice image created by Guido van Brakel in the following blog post: Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 really explains it:
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Data Deduplication[/caption]
In Windows Server 2012 R2 they have added a new functionality called:
- Data deduplication for remote storage of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workloads
This means you can use the Data Deduplication for your virtual machines when you are running Windows Server 2012 R2 meaning that when you have four virtual machines running the same operating system you will not have to take up all that amount off disk space.
Take a look at the following articles if you want to get started with Data Deduplication: