supported for VDI deployments, the actual data deduplication is a core part of the
storage stack, and so there is no block to stop data deduplication working with other
virtual workloads. However, these workloads have not been tested. I would be very
concerned about enabling data deduplication on some types of workloads, such as any
kind of database. It is therefore important that when configuring data deduplication
on a volume that has mixed workloads, you explicitly block folders containing virtual
hard disks that you do not want to be deduplicated.
VDI is one of the great scenarios for using differencing disks (which, remember, are
child disks of a parent disk with only differences stored in them). If data that is being
read is not in the differencing disk, it is read from the parent disk. Any write actions
are performed into the differencing disk. Therefore, in a pooled VDI scenario, a master
VHDX file would have the core Windows client image, the gold image, and then many
VDM virtual machines created with their own differencing disks that are children of
the master image. Each differencing disk would still be a couple of gigabytes because
of changes made during the specialization phase, but using differencing disks is still
an efficient solution. The master image can be stored on a high tier of storage, such as
the SSD tier if Storage Spaces is being used, and because the master would be read-
only, it would also benefit from any caching. Figure 4.32 shows this architecture.
Figure 4.32 Using differencing disks in a VDI environment
Windows Server 2016 continues the investment in data deduplication with the
following key enhancements:
Support for volumes of up to 64TB, thanks to a new data deduplication design.
Instead of running the optimization as a single job with a single thread (which
limited data deduplication to volumes of 10TB or less), the new deduplication
process pipeline uses multiple threads running in parallel and using multiple I/O
queues, resulting in improved performance and support for larger volumes.
Support for files up to 1TB
Support for virtualized backup applications such as System Center Data Protection
Manager to include a built-in preset configuration named Virtualized Back-up
Server