Dedup in W2012 and SCCM DPs

[Norphy]

When I tried to upgrade my SCCM 2012 SP1 installation to R2 recently, it killed the OS it was hosted on. I don't know why, I don't know how but the upshot is that I had to reinstall the OS and reinstall SCCM from its backup. This was a pleasantly simple process and I was up and running again within a day.

 

Anyway, I took the opportunity to upgrade the OS to 2012 R2 while I was at it (I regretted installing 2008 R2 on the initial install but there you go). The volume that my DP stored its content on was almost full, it had something like 15GB free. I trimmed as much stuff out as I could but still couldn't free up much space. I needed to get some more.

 

While SCCM 2012 supports SIS on DPs, I was curious to see if using 2012 deduplication was a supported configuration as well and to my delight, it is. I turned it on yesterday and looked at it this morning to see what savings were being made. To say the least, I'm impressed:

 

 

That's quite a saving! I think it's safe to say that anyone who is using Server 2012 to host their DPs should turn dedup on

[FragglePete]

I just copied over our Current Year 11s to the new server, (I'll do the rest of the years during the Summer), but like you I'm somewhat blown away by the deduplication rate. Mine is showing a rate of 50%, savings of 61.4Gb on that particular share!!!

 

Crikey!

 

Pete

[Norphy]

It's turned on on our file shares as well, we're getting savings between 40 and 65% but for me, that was more or less expected. When you turn on file redirection there is a hell of a lot of replicated data from things like appdata and the like. I was expecting some duplicated data on the SCCM DP but nowhere near that much!

[Sephiroth]

I have just completely rebuilt my domain from scratch onto 2012R2 and our file server is using deduplication. It is flawless and we have savings of almost 900GB over about 4TB of data (which includes 3 VHDs for our exchange databases).