Windows Server 2012r2 Data Deduplication

I have 10 40GB VMs now taking up a total of 70GB.

That’s data deduplication for you.

Windows Server2012r2 just did it. I’m running it on the host instance itself, and it…. just…. worked.

Just think – now those 128GB SSDs make sense I can fit an entire Datacenter on one of them. lol… a datacenter on an SSD. Never really thought that would be something I’d say. Seriously, make that 128GB SSD the storage volume for Hyper-V, set up all your VMs and whatnot, all stored on that SSD. Then, you could just yank that SSD and take it to another Hyper-V instance. It gets better…

Make that SSD disk be part of a storage space – a mirrored one. Then, once you get it all set up, you could duplicate all the VMs by just plugging in one or more additional SSDs and adding them to the storage space. This is also how you can do quick, effortless backups of, well, anything on your Windows Server 2012r2 instance – just add a disk to a mirrored storage pool and then yank it once it’s been synced up.