Run Windows 2012 Data Deduplication on Windows 8 2

My ASUS Zenbook is a powerful beast, but because I run some virtual lab environments in Windows 8 Hyper-V, I ran short on SSD disk space. Normally there’s only one possibility, by a larger SSD, but this time I found some post about “borrowing” the Windows 2012 data deduplication functionality. Actually it’s possible to move this feature of Windows 2012 to Windows 8. I followed the instructions and it worked wonderful for me. I regained 75% of disk space on my Hyper-V Lab partition.

If you follow the next steps remember that this only works on 64-bit Windows 8 and future updates can be a problem.

Here are the easy steps:

1. Copy the following files from a Windows 2012 disk or download these files to a directory on your Windows 8 x64 machine.
   • Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab
2. Start an elevated PowerShell prompt from this directory and run:
   • dism /online /add-package /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab
   • dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Dedup-Core /all
3. Deduplication is now installed (check Windows Features > File Server Role > Data Deduplication).
4. To know what the data savings will be you can run “ddpeval.exe” against a drive or folder. In my case I ran “PS C:\> ddpeval.exe L:\Hyper-V” what resulted in an expected 75% space savings.
5. Management of deduplication can only be done by PowerShell. To find all available commands, run PS C:\> Get-Command *dedup*.
6. To activate deduplication on a volume run: PS C:\> Enable-DedupVolume DriveLetter:“
7. PS C:\> Start-DedupJob –Volume DriveLetter: –Type Optimization
8. See deduplication progress: PS C:\> Get-DedupJob
9. Final result: PS C:\> Get-DedupVolume

For me these simple steps resulted in a data saving of 73% and saves my day until the prices of large SSD disks drop some more.