Deduplication is the business of compressing data without loss and this is now built into Windows Server 2012 as a role service.  The official marketing from us states that you will save somewhere between 20-70% of the space on your file servers if you implement this. If that’s sounds interesting my screencast shows how to configure and monitor it..

The clever thing about deduplication is that it’s built into NTFS, so you can apply it to any non system volume without the need for specialist storage.  There are some caveats:

• You can’t use it on the system volume
• It works on closed files so it won’t do any good against virtual hard disks or SQL Server database files for example. However you could and in some cases should turn it on inside a virtual machine and get the benefits of deduplication that way.
• The deduplication process does not happen when you write a file to disk, it runs in the background and is typically scheduled.  The default setting is to only deduplicate files older than 5 days the odds are that a file that hasn’t changed for 5 days won’t change that much again and is worth deduplicating.
• It will slow down your initial reads a bit (approx. 3%), but once a file is cached performance will improve a bit (approx. 8%)
• You’ll want to have a backup solution that is compatible with this new feature e.g. System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1 as well as VEEAM and Symantec Backup Exec (with more vendors updating their software all the time)

To try this yourself all you’ll need is an Evaluation Copy of Windows Server 2012. Having got the idea you may also want to see how well it will work on your data. To do that install it turn on the deduplication e.g. in Powershell..

Add-WindowsFeature –Name “FS-Data-Deduplication”

and then copy windows\system32\ddpeval.exe and run this against a file share, volume etc.  Note that this might put some load on your network but otherwise shouldn’t be too invasive as it will run in the background (possibly for hours on a big volume) before telling you what you would save if you enabled this feature.

Finally thanks to my good friend Simon;  he has done most of the legwork in setting up deduplication for our IT camps and I have shamelessly used that for the screencast.

TechEd is Microsoft’s premiere conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, offering the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's products, solutions, tools, and services.

We are pleased to announce that registration for TechEd North America and TechEd Europe will go live next week on Tuesday, February 12^th.

            TechEd North America                          TechEd Europe

            June 3-6                                                 25-28 June

            Morial Convention Center                    IFEMA – Feria de Madrid Convention Centre

            New Orleans, LA                                   Madrid, Spain

Attendees will get hands-on learning, deep product exploration and countless opportunities to build relationships with a community of Microsoft experts and industry peers. Visit www.msteched.com to learn more. 

Register by 22 March to take advantage of the Early Bird price of €1,695, a €300 savings off regular pricing.

At TechEd you will get 4 days of hands-on learning, deep product exploration and countless opportunities to build relationships with a community of Microsoft experts and peers. Need to deliver maximum business value while managing your company's technology investments? We’ve got you covered with multiple tracks featuring a breadth of Microsoft products and solutions.

So far in this series I have used the new storage features of Windows Server 2012 as a  place to run VMs from, but there’s more to it than that.  Shared storage used to mean presenting SAN storage inside a cluster, and you relied on your SAN experts to provision the storage you needed.  However with SAS / JBOD technologies coming along it’s possible to create storage that’s still highly available.  However you might still want access to some of the clever things a SAN can do like thin provisioning, where you define storage you plan to use but actually haven’t got yet.  So in this short screencast I show how storage spaces in Windows Server meets this need..

To try this out all you’ll need is one virtual machine running on one laptop and an Evaluation Copy of Windows Server 2012

Notes

I used a bunch of SCSI disks in my demo VM to build a storage space and they were all the same size. They don’t have to all be SCSI,  they could be attached via USB, SATA etc. and can be of varying size and performance.  However if you want to  create a storage pool in a cluster then the disks must be SAS (Serial attached SCSI) for that.  Also bear in mind that the pool will work down to the slowest disk and not up to the fastest.

I do have a script to build my fileserver, which in turn relies on a configuration file to add in the roles and features I need, and it builds form a sysprep copy of Windows Server 2012 with an answer file to join it to my Contoso domain.  It does have a really useful function from Simon to rename the VM in active directory (so it is called FileServer1 in AD as well being the name of the VM in Hyper-V).

Rather than running a virtual machine or using the storage space for ordinary files, in this screencast I used it to host a SQL Server database. SQL Server 2012 has support for storing databases on SMB shares and  I have seen 200,000 iops in SQL Server where the database is on a remote share like this.  However the UI in Server manager doesn’t seem to allow you to navigate across shares (have I been away form SQL Server too long?) so I did the attach from a simple  SQL Server T-SQL script.

Storage spaces often raises a lot of questions at our camps so here’s a good FAQ on TechNet.  If you are curious about performance my advice is to test your big idea thoroughly and check this script and whitepaper to ensure you have the optimal setup.

As I type this I am working hard with Simon to prepare for our next wave of IT Camps specifically the new camps on System Center 2012 sp1.  Having just completed the five exams of MCSE Private Cloud I am now having to readjust to how much is different as a result of this service pack coming out.  The key change is that System Center has had to change to run on and support Windows Server 2012 for example:

• Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) has to support all of the new stuff in Hyper –V so Shared Nothing and Storage Migration plus all the changes to all the performance limits such as the number of cores.  Virtual Networks aren’t obvious in Windows Server 2012 (they  can only be referenced from Powershell), but they show up really will in the network diagrams in VMM.  VMM also has to understand the other parts of Server 2012 e.g.  virtual machines can now be run form SMB shares , NIC teaming, and the new standards based storage management (SMI-S)
• Operations manager has to be able to monitor the new version of server, and track the health of these new features, for example 360 health of .Net applications, storage health, IIS 8 health and so on.
• Data Protection needs to be able to understand and work with deduplication as well as the new REFS file system as does any backup provider.

System Center 2012 can now run on SQL Server 2012, which in its Enterprise edition provides availability groups to protect your key System Center data.  There’s also the capability to do some really clever business intelligence in this release with Office 2013 to help you understand and predict demand in a large datacentre and better respond to the rhythms of your business.

Then there are individual enhancements to each component of the suite..

• Orchestrator gets a new integration pack for Exchange so you can easily setup Runbooks to automate that part of your fabric.
• Operations Manager has better support for more flavours of Linux e.g. Oracle, Debian & Ubuntu.
• Configuration Manager has also undergone a lot of changes to fully manage Windows 8 in the enterprise, for example side-loading modern applications, windows to go support and BitLocker configuration.  It’s also important to remember that config manager can also manage Server 2012 and set such things as desired configuration baselines.
• Service Manager introduces chargeback, one of the key pillars of a private cloud, and essential if you want to benchmark your IT department against third party service providers.
• Virtual Machine Manager will now manage up to Vmware VSphere5.1 and Citrix XenServer 6.0.

Finally each component has better integration with the others and so there is a general sharpening of the whole suite.  So that is quite a lot of stuff for a service pack and would easily take a day to go through assuming like me you are already au fait with System Center 2012. 

I also know that a lot of you have been holding off evaluating or deploying Windows Server 2012 until this service pack was released as you quite rightly want to manage this new version of Windows Server. 

Finally we are on tour with the System Center camps Manchester, Birmingham and York and we have a few places left on each of them so please don’t beat me up in a few months time that we didn’t run these, and please please cancel if you can’t make it as it does allow us to plan and to let others off the shortlist if it does fill up.

If you can’t make it and you want to try System Center sp1 you can get it here.. but note this is just for evaluation you can’t upgrade to the full version or migrate data from this.

I have to say this one caught me out. I’m just setting up a task sequence to deploy Windows 8 and pre-provision BitLocker (which is wicked fast by the way!) and got caught with enabling and activating the TPM from WinPE.  The solution I came up with works for me, on a Samsung Series 7 Slate but might not work for all hardware vendors (TPM is a little tricky like that).

The process turned out to be pretty simple.

1. Download the EnableBitLocker.vbs script from MSDN.
2. Copy the file to my Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 Site Server.
3. Edit the file and change the reference to “setup.exe /s” and “setup.exe /r” (shutdown and reboot in full Windows) to “wpeutil shutdown” and “wpeutil reboot” respectively. I did this because WinPE doesn’t include shutdown.exe but instead uses wpeutil to do the same(ish) thing.
4. Created an Application Management package containing only the EnableBitLocker.vbs script and distributed it to my DPs.
5. Added a Run Command Line task to my Windows 8 deployment task sequence, after Restart in Windows PE and before Pre-provision BitLocker.
6. PXE booted and deployed my task sequence to my target machine.

The final effect takes advantage of Windows 8’s used space only encryption and starts encryption before the OS is even deployed, encrypting as the OS deploys – the net result is a fully encrypted machine within minutes!

Don’t forget to download Windows Server 2012, System Center and Windows 8 Enterprise to try this out and take a look at my other posts on System Center.