Friday, December 13, 2013

Hyper-V + SSD + "Data Deduplication" on Windows Server 2012


As a SharePoint developer or administrator, we all have a number ( >10 ) of virtual machines for test and development environment. If your VMs are hosted on Windows Server 2012 and stored on SSD ...... don't forget to enable "Data Deduplication"!

Why? Please check the screenshot below. 340GB vhdx files are "shrinked" to 54GB!

There are some extra cost of disk space. Let's check it from OS level, as the screenshot below, those 340GB vhdx files still takes less than 125GB disk space! What does this mean? Even a 240GB SSD is enough for a SharePoint 2013 development environment.

I am not a virtual machine expert. But if Data Deduplication is as good as here said, I believe that for most of the companies, the ESX vs Hyper-V war is over. Hyper-V wins. Let's imagine how many SSD RAID it can save for 1000 virtual machines!

This feature is really impressive. I strongly recommend it to all SharePoint gurus!

Please let me know if you have different thoughts.

2 comments:

  1. Just wondering if you are still happy with the SSD as deduplicated drive? Does it keeps having excellent performance over-time? Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, I am still very happy and don't see any problem.

    But I have to confess that those VMs are all for development purpose, so the workload is not heavy.

    ReplyDelete