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:
- 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
- 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
- Deduplication is now installed (check Windows Features > File Server Role > Data Deduplication).
- 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.
- Management of deduplication can only be done by PowerShell. To find all available commands, run PS C:\> Get-Command *dedup*.
- To activate deduplication on a volume run: PS C:\> Enable-DedupVolume DriveLetter:“
- PS C:\> Start-DedupJob –Volume DriveLetter: –Type Optimization
- See deduplication progress: PS C:\> Get-DedupJob
- 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.
Cesare,
Where are these .cab files located on the Server 2012 DVD?
Hi Ed,
Sorry for my late response but I was overloaded with work last week.
As far as the cab files, you will not find them on the DVD. Check this forum post for the explanation. (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/72a76cdc-8e6e-4eb6-8ef7-822ee3f6b0ea/where-are-the-cab-files). Best is to download them from (if you trust the files) from here (http://sdrv.ms/12AVvK0).
Good luck with dedupping 🙂
Cesare