Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Windows 8.1 & Deduplication? YES We Can!

Deduplication is an awesome Windows Server 2012 (R2) feature. Sometime ago two IT experts advised me to enable it on my test lab – running Hyper-V based on Windows Server 2012 R2 - and I must say I am impressed!

The amount of disk space saved on both SSDs I use for running my VMs is impressive. I am talking here about 100+ GB per SSD drive! And until now I experience no performance hits what so ever.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have dedup on Windows 8.1 as well?
I run multiple test labs. Besides the one at home I am blessed with a real powerful notebook with an SSD as well which I solely use for my VMs, based on the Windows 8.1 hyper visor. And it runs very well. However, the SSD is running out of free space. So wouldn’t dedup work here as well?

Yes, of course! However, out of the box, dedup isn’t available on Windows 8.x machines, since it’s a Windows Server 2012 feature only…

Along came Teh Wei King…
But when searching the internet for a solution I soon bumped into the blog of Teh Wei King. He runs a blog all about geeky stuff Smile. And YES! He has posted two articles all about enabling dedup on Windows 8 clients and Windows 8.1 clients.

Both postings are required since the first posting (enabling dedup on Windows 8 clients) tells you all about how to use the code and required files found in the second posting, all about enabling dedup on Windows 8.1 clients.

The dedup job is still running on my notebook but already 10 GB of additional free disk space is added!

All credits go to Teh Wei King of course. Thanks for sharing Teh Wei King!

One additional comment
In order to make sure dedup processes EVERY file run this command for the volume where you want to enable dedup for. In thise example dedup is enabled for volume E:

Set-DedupVolume E: -MinimumFileAgeDays 0

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