Windows 2012 R2 disk deduplication

Today we are going to talk about the file deduplication, a service which can achieve space savings of 60% into VDI infrastructures. 

There are some software requisites to setup before deduplication. To start the setup you have to add the following roles in to the server:

Firstly you have to understand and setup the storage pool, here are some very good posts about it:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2012/08/31/windows-server-2012-storage-virtualization-explained.aspx
and
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2012/10/10/windows-server-2012-storage-spaces-is-it-for-you-could-be.aspx

Once you have the storage pool configured, is time to setup the deduplication, but don't do it before reading this post about deduplication deployment considerations http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831700.aspx

You have to click right over the volume that you want deduplicate as you can see in the following images:

Now, you have setup your first deduplicated disk.
The deduplication is executed by a scheduled task, by default, it starts the deduplication process when the server is idle.
You can force it for the first time with some powershell commands.
Get-DedupStatus <-- It shows you the status of deduplication.
Start-DedupJob -type Optimization -volume d:  <-- It starts a deduplication job manually
Get-DedupJob  <--It shows you the deduplication task status.

Here is the result of applying the deduplication over ten Windows 2008 virtual machines:

Finally, remember, deduplication has some overhead into the system CPU, can´t be applied to system volumes, can´t be applied into removable drives, deduplication job is executed only in one processor.