Windows Data Deduplication – Garbage Collection

Running on a limited SSD storage in machine, the first thing after it was setup is to create 2 logical disk partitions (OS and Data) and to enable data deduplication on the data drive (well, you might know now that we are not able enable data deduplication for OS partition)

Windows 8.1 does not come with a data dedup feature but i supposed there should be lot’s of links in the net that can guide you to enable data deduplication in windows 8.1

Once configured, you should be able to reap the rewards of huge disk space saving especially if you the machine is hosting some test VMs. But after a while, you might find that the disk space does not decrease over time, even after you manually run the “start-dedupJob” cmdlets.

One of the reason is that, there’s a garbage collection job, scheduled at 2.45 am every Saturday and if the machine is not turned on all the time, the job might not even been executed.

One of the way is to manually run the dedup job again using the “GarbageCollection” parameter

Start-DedupJob -Volume <volume> -Type GarbageCollection

and this should get rid of the unwanted file chunks.

Install Windows Roles & Features from Configuration File

Used to be launching the wizard while installing the Roles & Features for every new server setup, but it might be tiring and repetitive if you have multiple servers to setup at the same time.

One of the ways is to construct a powershell script to include all the features that are needed and run in.

As for someone with limited powershell knowledge like me, there is actually another way to simplify the amount of time needed to each configuration, via an exported configuration settings file

For a start, you will still need to launch the add Roles & Features wizard to customize the required components you need. However, towards the end of the wizard (just before confirming the installation), you can actually click on the “Export configuration settings” and save it as an xml file (default filename is DeploymentConfigTemplate.xml).

 

Next, once you have the xml file, login in to the server you want to have the exact Roles & Features install, run the following powershell command (with admin rights of course !!) and the server will now start the install the roles and features according to what’s in the configuration template.

install-WindowsFeature –configurationfilepath <full path of your config file>

and displays a status once done

* if you include .net framework 3.5, make sure in include the –source pointing to the sxs folder, if not it will attempt to download from the internet