When using Veeam on a physical server one design is to use local disk as tier 1 storage. Veeam can be setup to use compression and dedupe per job which works well and Windows Server since 2012 have added a free feature for file deduplication at a volume level. If you are using a physical Windows 2012 server this feature can add to the already good dedupe rate from Veeam. The following shows some early result - some early good results!

If you want to set this up go to Server Manger - Add Feature - File and Storage Services - File and iSCSI services - Data Deduplication

Install this feature then open Server Manager - File and Storage Services - Volumes.

Right click the volume where the Veeam repository is configured - Configure Data Deduplication

Enable dedupe for this volume and choose to configure schedule. I choose to run the schedule during the working day as this server is a dedicated Veeam server and out of working hours it is running Veeam jobs. I also choose to dedupe data after 1 day.

Below shows some early results. I set Veeam up to use Extreme compression and enable deduplication, each job has a server with the same OS and will run a similar role. No more then 20 VMs per job though. The repository is a CIFS share with ‘Align 4k Blocks’ enabled. After just 1 week I see a 2.35TB (42%) saving! From a free feature! Pretty sweet

This is after 1 week, I will try and update this after a longer period. Some considerations - I have enabled this a few time in the real world and the savings continue but keep in mind if the volume fills up and you clear out the data you must also clear out the deduped data