Thursday, October 23, 2014

Windows Server 2012 Deduplication - Powershell Reference

Some key background points on deduplication on Windows Server 2012:

  • There is a scheduler which runs one deduplication job / operation at any point in time
  • Powershell and windows commands add jobs to the scheduler queue - only one job may run at a given point in time
  • Types of deduplication operations:
    • Optimization - deduplicates files on the filesystem. 
    • Scrubbing - performs an integrity check of the deduplication store
    • GarbageCollection - files deleted from the filesystem do not automatically free up space on the disk. A garbage collection must be run to clean up the dedupe store
  • You can configure the minimum age of files to deduplicate. Typically this should be set to a value greater than one day to ensure active files are not deduplicated.


Here are some handy powershell commands for managing deduplication on Windows Server 2012:


# Enqueue  Full integrity check of the dedup store
Start-DedupJob -Type Scrubbing -Full -Priority High -Volume D:

# Enqueue Garbage Collection of dedup store - deleted files won't reclaim space until GC is done
​Start-DedupJob -Type GarbageCollection -Full -Priority High -Volume D:

​# ​Get running / queued dedup jobs
get-dedupjob

# Get dedup summary status
get-dedupstatus

​# Enqueue the optimization job
​Start-DedupJob -Type Optimization -Full -Priority High -Volume D: