In order of preference based on protection and performance, you’ll want to look at RAID 10, RAID 5, and then RAID 6. There is an excellent table that was used in the VeeamOn session on repository best practices, which I have re-created here. Know your RAID levelsĮveryone likes to have their disks protected, but at what cost? Depending on the RAID level you will see a hit on your overall storage and/or performance. Note that this is different than the RAID stripe size (we’ll get to that shortly). Once again, the ever so useful Veeam forums have more information.
ReFS does support files up to 16 Exabytes though.Īlso, be sure to check that your disk’s allocation unit size is set to 64K. As of this writing, I can’t seem to find a maximum file size for NTFS if Server 2016. The maximum file size for Server 2012 is 256 TB. NTFS: Be sure to format the volume for large files (format x: /L) in order to support larger files. However, based on tests that Veeam ran, it looks like larger files are still processed, but anything over 4 TB is skipped. There is a thread over at the Veeam forums that indicates Microsoft doesn’t intend to test deduplication on files larger than 1 TB. There are supposed to be improvements on this front with Server 2016. Per-VM job chains might be able to help you get around this if you are running Veeam version 9.The dedupe process is also single-threaded, so it might take some time to see those storage gains. Depending on your backup size, you might be over that. If you are using Windows as the OS for the repository, there are some specific considerations to pay attention to.ĭeduplication: Server 2012 R2 has a maximum supported dedupe file size of 1TB. In Part 2 we are going to look at using Windows as a repository, along with RAID best practices.
In Part 1 of the series I covered off some of the basic hardware recommendations along with best practices for interacting with your storage.