Windows 2016 ReFS as a Veeam backup repository?

Do we really need dedupe storage for our long term backups? Well, dedupe storage certainly has it’s merits in the toolbox when you design your backup environment. But we do need to be aware of some of the drawbacks with dedupe, for instance performance for random I/O and rehydration of data if doing synthetic full backups. However, there’s been a great disturbance in the Force as of recently.

Microsoft made a huge release earlier this year with the “2016”-suite, I thought it’d be a good idea to go through how to set up a server to be used as a repository for Veeam Backup & replication 9.5 and show some of the results. More specifically, let’s use the amazing Resilient File System (ReFS) v3 found in Windows Server 2016.

Windows Server 2016 can be installed in two modes, with or without a GUI. Now, if no GUI is installed you can use powershell to do the configuration but for simplicity we’re going to use the GUI which is called “Desktop experience” in the installer.

So boot your server from the dvd/iso and select Windows Server 2016 (Desktop Experience) of your flavor.

Desktop Experience

In the next step, select “Custom: Install windows only (advanced)”

Install

Select the drive to install Windows on:

C drive

Now the installation will start copying files to the drive and commence the installation of Windows.

Start installation

Click on Tools and select Computer Management in the server manager window:

Computer management

Open up the Disk management tool, this is where you find the attached drives on the server. In my case I have one drive where I installed windows and two additional drives. I’ll make some benchmarks later so I’m going to format one drive with ReFS and the other one with NTFS for comparison, but first let’s get them online:

Disk online

Then initialize the disks:

Initialize disk

Next up, we create a new simple volume on one of the disks:

Simple kolumn

Select file system and give the volume a name:

ReFS volume

Next disk we format with NTFS instead:

100

The result looks like this:

110

So let’s test it out and see if there’s any noticeable difference when using these as target for our backups.

I’ve created a folder on each of the disks and made two Veeam Backup Repositories, I’ve created two jobs backing up the same VM running Windows Server 2016(with different targets) and set up synthetic full backup, this is where Windows ReFS should really shine if you believe the hype.

Backup jobs

When the backup has run a few iterations it was time for the Synthetic Full backup using the NTFS backup repository as target:

NTFS Usage

So with NTFS, a full backup, a few incremental backups and at the end a Synthetic full backup used roughly 12 GB of disk space. Good deduplication and compression and not a lot of changes in the VM of course. But what about the ReFS repository?

Usage ReFS

Same backup intervall with a Synthetic full backup at the end generated roughly 7 GB go disk usage, pretty significant reduction in usage if you ask me. Now disk usage is when of the key features on why to use ReFS with it’s “spaceless full backup technology” but there’s another benefit the has the same groundbreaking impact: Time.

Time it takes to make the full backup. Let’s take a look at the time it took to create the synthetic full backup on the NTFS repo.

NTFS synthetic full4 minutes and 15 seconds is not the bad for my VM, but imagine it being dozens of VMs…How does the ReFS repo compare then?

ReFS synthetic full11 seconds! Must be a typo? NO, it’s really not. Quite impressive. Now you might rethink the dedupe storage approach, you have all the space savings (almost) of the dedupe storage but performance of a traditional disk with no need to rehydrate data.

If you want to make it highly resilient you can leverage another Microsoft technology called Storage Spaces Direct where you’d get fault tolerance and “auto-healing” as well.

A fantastic job from Microsoft with ReFS/Storage Spaces Direct and Veeam with the integration of the technology into Backup & Replication!