Veeam 9.5 and ReFS: Fast Cloning and Spaceless Full Technology
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 integrates with Windows Server 2016 ReFS, bringing two key benefits to synthetic and merge operations: Fast Cloning and Spaceless Full Backups.
Both of these features rely on ReFS block cloning, which allows Veeam to quickly copy data blocks within files, or even between files, without creating duplicate copies of the data. Instead, ReFS creates pointers to existing data blocks, significantly improving performance and storage efficiency.
Fast Cloning
Fast Cloning with ReFS dramatically reduces the time and resources required for synthetic operations. Because new full backups only reference existing data blocks (using pointers), rather than duplicating the data, synthetic operations become much faster and less resource-intensive.
Spaceless Full Backups
Spaceless full backups are made possible through the use of pointers, allowing new synthetic backups to take up significantly less storage space. Since the majority of data remains unchanged between backup copies, spaceless fulls only reference existing data blocks rather than creating new copies. This reduces the storage required for full backups to a fraction of what would otherwise be needed.
Storage Efficiency with ReFS
While spaceless full backups offer tremendous storage savings, it’s important to note that global deduplication is not supported. ReFS spaceless full backups reduce storage usage within copies of the same full backup file, but they won’t deduplicate across multiple backup files like a deduplication appliance would. Still, the storage savings can be significant.
For example, after migrating a customer with nearly 1TB of native backup size from an NTFS repository to an ReFS repository, the utilized storage dropped to less than half of the native file size after one month of weekly and monthly GFS backup copies. As older GFS restore points are removed and replaced with ReFS spaceless fulls, the storage utilization will continue to decrease.
Encryption with Spaceless Fulls
One major advantage of ReFS spaceless fulls is that encryption is fully supported. Unlike deduplication, which prevents encryption, spaceless fulls in ReFS allow for both encryption and storage efficiency. This means your backups can remain secure while still benefiting from the space-saving advantages of ReFS.
Adding ReFS Volumes as Veeam Repositories
To leverage the benefits of ReFS with Veeam, older repositories need to be attached to a Windows Server 2016 machine and formatted as ReFS. If you’ve previously added a Windows Server 2016 ReFS volume as a repository, it will need to be re-added after upgrading to Veeam v9.5 for the system to recognize the new features.
Important:
Veeam’s fast cloning and spaceless full technologies only support ReFS volumes created on Windows Server 2016. ReFS volumes formatted on Windows Server 2012 will not benefit from these features, as they use an older version of ReFS.
Additionally, restore points created before the v9.5 upgrade won’t see the new benefits. To fully utilize fast cloning and spaceless full backups, all full and incremental backups involved in synthetic operations must be created using Veeam v9.5 with a Windows Server 2016 ReFS repository. The Fast Clone tag will appear in the job activity logs once the feature is active, indicating the synthetic operation is using the optimized ReFS technology.
Veeam v9.5 was recently released and with it came a large number of improvements and added features. Namely, the seamless integration of Microsoft Server 2016’s
Key Recommendations
- Perform an active or synthetic full backup (including GFS) after upgrading to Veeam v9.5 to begin taking advantage of fast cloning and spaceless fulls.
- Use 64K Block Size when formatting ReFS volumes in the Veeam repository to avoid potential issues with 4K Block Size on ReFS.
Update: Make sure to use 64K Block Size when formatting the Veeam repository volumes to avoid issues with 4K Block Size and ReFS. Read this post for more information.
