Deduplication question

[Chrisb2k]

Hi all,

Just been looking at NetBackup appliances for a customer and a question comes to mind that wasn't so much of a consideration when I last had to do think about it (i.e. before Exchange and SQL were virtualised to any great extent).

Do dedupe ratios remain the same if, say, Exchange us running on a vm and stored on a datastore?

Or to put it another way, would Exchange running on a vm be classed as Exchange data or VMWare data, being that it lives within a VMDK file?

Thanks,

Chris

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

It is VMware data .... but then it does dig down into the vmdk and dedupe .. so that captured application state would be exchange snapshot data just like it was using a traditional client

I dont have a system to prove it to you as yet but i dont think you need to worry too much ... i get the same dedeupe ratio's for my exchange VMs as i do my traditional ones.

Having said that i am about to change a set of Exchange VMs back over to traditional agent based backups .. simply due to their size and to control the exchange backups in a better way (many reasonable size database backups VS one 3.5 TB backup)

Hope that helps .. although i cannot say that it will use the same fingerprints but based on how the capture works i would think that it would

[Chrisb2k]

Great, thanks for the reply!

C.