Previously when running Windows 8 or hyper-v server 2012R2 it would be easy to implement Deduplication on those workstations/servers by installing the deduplication binaries found in Windows Server 2012 R2 (as I described here).
Being on Windows 10 and being a Windows Insider (in the fast ring!) I found it hard to use deduplication, there are some binaries that can be found on the internet coming from Windows Server 2016 tech preview. But receiving new build on an almost weekly basis, it is very hard to keep dedup working this way.
I started looking for alternative solutions and basically found OpenDedup. In this post I will guide you through the setup and configuration of OpenDedup.
First of all download the windows installer from here.
After that install the program, when the program asked in which location to install, to make things easy I installed the program on the hard drive I wanted the deduplication to happen, so in my case I installed it on D:\sdfs
Reboot after installation is done.
When the reboot is done open an elevated command prompt and enter the following command:
mksdfs --volume-name=sdfs_vol1 --volume-capacity=<CAPACITY>GB (replace with the size of the volume you would want)
When the volume is initialized you still need to mount the file, you can do this by entering the following command from the same command prompt:
mountsdfs -v sdfs_vol1 -m <driveletter you want>
Now you can use your deduped volume in the Hyper-V configuration or in VMware workstation, or hypervisor of choice.
One thing, after reboot you need to remount the volume again. Ofcourse we want the Volume to be available after reboot. So from the elevated command prompt we wil create a service to mount the volume. Enter the following command:
sc create sdfss binPath="\"D:\sdfs\mountsdfs.exe\" -v sdfs_vol1 -m E -cp" DisplayName="Hyper-V Drive" start=auto
After this the volume will be persistant after a reboot.