Advanced ReFS Integration with Veeam Overview...Advanced ReFS Integration with Veeam Overview •...

Advanced ReFS Integration with Veeam Overview

Rick VanoverCisco Champion, MVP, vExpert

© 2017 Veeam Software. Confidential information. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2


ContentsExecutive overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Veeam Advanced ReFS Integration: Business value and technical benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Introducing the ReFS file system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Configuring a ReFS repository . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Configuring jobs using a ReFS Repository . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Storage Efficiencies with ReFS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

ReFS summary: Storage efficiency, reduced I/O, shorter backup windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10



Executive overviewVeeam® Availability Suite™ 9 .5 included several enhancements to deliver enterprise scalability . One of the key technologies of 9 .5 included integration with the Resilient File System, otherwise known as, the ReFS file system from Microsoft . This paper series will provide an overview of ReFS, information on how to use Veeam with ReFS and how to see storage efficiencies in an ongoing manner .

Veeam Advanced ReFS Integration: Business value and technical benefitsThis feature came as part of Veeam Availability Suite 9 .5 and will allow organizations of all types to enjoy some significant new benefits in regards to the backup storage in use . This technology will benefit organizations to provide greater performance and data integrity for large-scale data sets . This will lead to:

• Shorter backup windows and lower backup storage load

• Reduced backup storage capacity consumption that rivals that of deduplication technologies

• More reliable forever-incremental data archiving with protection against silent data corruption

These benefits will equate to reduced spending on backup storage as well as improved Availability of both the backup storage systems and the backup data itself . There are three key technical benefits that come with this new capability:

Fast Cloning Technology: This enables up to a 10x faster creation and transformation of synthetic full backup files, all without physically moving data blocks between files, for even shorter backup windows and lower backup storage load .

Spaceless Full Backup Technology: This is a storage-efficiency technology that allows multiple full backup files residing on the same ReFS volume to share the same physical data blocks, resulting in reduced backup storage capacity consumption that rivals that of deduplication technologies .

Data integrity streams: This integration leverages the ReFS data integrity scanner and proactive error correction from Storage Spaces to protect backup files from silent corruption for more reliable forever-incremental archiving .The content for ReFS will be delivered over three papers . They will be structured as follows:

1 . A base deployment model with only using ReFS (this paper) .

2 . ReFS using Storage Spaces .

3 . ReFS using Storage Spaces Direct .



Introducing the ReFS file systemReFS (short for Resilient File System) was introduced as one of the many new storage technologies that came with Windows Server 2012 . ReFS has been improved on from Windows Server 2012 R2 and now with Windows Server 2016 is in its third generation (technically designated as ReFS version 3 .1) . Unrelated to the backup storage use case which is described in this paper, Microsoft has specific capabilities around ReFS for Hyper-V environments that improve speed and efficiency with checkpoints and fixed VHDX creation .

There are many limit increases and characteristics that are different between NFTS and ReFS; but for the scope of this paper, that isn’t relevant . The important differences and attributes to keep in mind for leveraging the Veeam Advanced ReFS integration are the following:

• ReFS is currently not supported on boot volumes. This means that a system that would hold a ReFS volume would have a boot volume (usually C:) as an NFTS volume .

• Windows Server 2016 is the current version. At the time of this paper, Windows Server 2016 is the current version that offers ReFS version 3 .1 which will leverage the full capabilities relevant to Veeam . The Veeam capabilities with ReFS are available on the Windows Server 2016 server operating system and Windows 10 .

• Removable drives aren’t an option. ReFS cannot be used on removable media, which may be a consideration for rotating drive repositories .

• Many deployment models are available. The ReFS capabilities regarding backup storage are supported as physical servers, local storage, block storage systems (FC/iSCSI) and virtual machines running vSphere or Hyper-V .

• Not all feature for NTFS are available on ReFS. The main example here is data deduplication in Windows Server . This is currently available only on NTFS volumes . Note there are storage efficiencies provided with Veeam’s implementation leveraging ReFS that are explained later .

The ReFS file system does well when used with other technologies . It has a good application to store backup data when a software product can leverage its capabilities . Additionally, when used in conjunction with Storage Spaces (discussed in subsequent papers in this series), more data integrity capabilities can be leveraged .

Central to the ReFS integration leveraged in Veeam is the fast cloning capability . The ReFS API, Block Cloning, will create synthetic backups without moving the data blocks between files, and instead, references backup file blocks already present on the volume . This means all manipulations associated with synthetic full backups are limited to metadata updates and require no actual I/O operations on backed up data .

Configuring a ReFS repositoryIn Veeam Backup & Replication™, a backup repository is a storage location where you can store backup files, VM copies and metadata for replicated VMs . For the ReFS file system, the main thing is to ensure that the system with the backup repository role has the ReFS storage and contains a few, yet key characteristics:

• Is a Windows Server 2016 system (physical server or virtual machine)

• The storage resource was formatted as ReFS in Windows Server 2016 (not formatted in ReFS from a build earlier than the Windows Server 2016 generally available release)

• The storage resource is formatted at 64K block size



• The March 2016 Cumulative Update is installed (Microsoft KB4013429) — and possibly KB4016173 for more aggressive memory unmapping if frequent fast clone operations are performed

These are rather straightforward options, and a few highlights are shown below:

Block size: Formatting a ReFS volume at 64K is not the default (which is 4K) but is recommended for Veeam backup file sizes and the associated manipulations needed .

Verification of configuration: If a storage path on a Windows Server 2016 system is not correctly using ReFS, Veeam Backup & Replication will issue a warning indicating that the target does not support ReFS fast cloning . The message below is an important notification as there effectively is no user interface to configure the Veeam ReFS integration as it is on by default on supported targets .

Additionally, if the volume isn’t formatted at 64K block size, a different message will be presented as a safeguard to not put backups in this repository without proper configuration:

Default options: Note that when a ReFS Repository is correctly configured, Veeam Backup & Replication will by default set the option to align backup file data blocks . This will allow more efficient use of the fast clone technology:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4013429/windows-10-update-kb4013429

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4016173/fix-heavy-memory-usage-in-refs-on-windows-server-2016-and-windows-10



Configuring jobs using a ReFS RepositoryIn Veeam Backup & Replication, there are no special settings required in the backup copy or backup job to leverage the ReFS capabilities . The benefits will be leveraged with these tasks within jobs:

• Synthetic full backup in a backup Job

• Full backup file merge in a backup copy job

• Weekly restore point retention in a backup copy job

• Monthly restore point retention in a backup copy job

• Quarterly restore point retention in a backup copy job

• Yearly restore point retention in a backup copy job

• Merge of backup files (including in reverse incremental backups)

*Note that if the “Active Full GFS” option is selected, ReFS Fast Clone features will not be used.

These steps will leverage the fast clone technology and will provide three key benefits:

1 . Reduced storage space

2 . Reduced I/O on backup storage

3 . Reduced time on backup or backup copy jobs

When looking to see when the fast clone technology applies to a job, you can look in the statistics for a backup or backup copy job to see where it applies . The fast clone capability applies to a job rather than an individual object . Therefore, if a job has many Veeam Agents or many virtual machines, the fast clone action will apply to all the objects within the given job (matching that of the backup file itself) . The section below shows a few examples where the fast clone technology applies to a job .

Full backup merge in a backup copy job: All occurrences of a backup copy job (this example is every 1 day), the merging will use the fast clone technology . This example is a backup copy job of three Veeam Agent for Linux jobs that send their backups to an ReFS-enabled repository and the backup copy job places these backups in a different ReFS-enabled repository . Note the highlighted “fast clone” indicating the ReFS integration:



Weekly restore point merge in a backup copy job: If GFS retention (See Veeam Helpcenter) is used in the backup copy job, the file merge operations can be made more efficient with ReFS . In the example below, a weekly merge of the same three Veeam Agent for Linux backups (will also serve as a monthly restore point) is performed below with the fast clone technology:

Synthetic full backup in a backup job: For backup jobs, one of the most common ways to see ReFS benefits are from the synthetic full backup (See Veeam Help Center) . The figure below shows a backup of a virtual machine where the synthetic full backup is created nearly instantly to merge approximately 7% change rate of a backup job (2 .1 GB change of 28 .3 GB source):

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_copy_gfs.html?ver=95

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/synthetic_full_hiw.html?ver=95



Storage Efficiencies with ReFSAs shown in the examples above, the ReFS integration makes many disk operations take less time and less I/O on the backup storage . The fast clone API brings this capability in by referencing existing blocks on disk . This means that storage efficiencies can also be observed on disk . This storage efficiency is that those existing blocks that need to be used for synthetic full backups or GFS restore points in a backup copy job don’t have to be duplicated on disk, since we’re just using metadata and pointers to reference the existing blocks . While this storage efficiency is not a deduplication technology, it does introduce space savings . Data deduplication (from Microsoft Windows Server 2016) on ReFS is currently not supported . Veeam Backup & Replication does have built-in compression and deduplication that is applied to the backup data as it lands on a repository that is formatted with ReFS however .

This storage efficiency will show significant space savings when multiple GFS restore points or synthetic full backups are kept on disk . This storage efficiency may allow organizations to have a longer retention due to much of the data in a full backup not changing . There is no blanket recommendation, as all environments are different . As a general rule, however, the lower the change rate, the more likely more retention can be put in with synthetic full backups without consuming more space .

The easy way to measure storage efficiency is via the properties of the ReFS volume on the server hosting the backup repository . An easy way to do this is via Server Manager and identify the ReFS volume and find the percent used . The repository used for the examples above are hosted on the V: drive of the system below and approximately 131 GB are used:



When looking in File Explorer to the folder that has the backups, the storage efficiencies can be seen much more clearly . Of the 131 GB in the figure above, there are 705 GB of backup data on disk . This clearly highlights the storage efficiency .

This much of a storage efficiency was obtained because a synthetic full backup was done every day for over a month for the VM backups, and for the Veeam Agent for Linux, weekly backups and monthly backups were held on disk during the same time . Most organizations would not need a synthetic full backup every day . The average size of the VM full backup is 14 GB . Even if 27 of them were removed (assuming 4 synthetic full backups would remain), there would still be a significant storage efficiency .

ReFS summary: Storage efficiency, reduced I/O, shorter backup windowsOrganizations of all types can enjoy the ReFS integration with Veeam Backup & Replication starting with Veeam Availability Suite 9 .5 . Find out more at Veeam .com and to see subsequent ReFS papers in this series .



About Veeam SoftwareVeeam® recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Business™, a business that must operate 24 .7 .365 . To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) of < 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified protection, leveraged data and complete visibility . Veeam Availability Suite™, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication™, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs .

Founded in 2006, Veeam currently has 47,000 ProPartners and more than 242,000 customers worldwide . Veeam‘s global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland, and the company has offices throughout the world . To learn more, visit http://www .veeam .com .

About the AuthorRick Vanover (Cisco Champion, MVP, vExpert) is the Director of Technical Product Marketing & Evangelism for Veeam Software based in Columbus, Ohio . Rick’s IT experience includes system administration and IT management; with virtualization being the central theme of his career recently .

Follow Rick on Twitter @RickVanover or @Veeam .

http://www.veeam.com

https://www.veeam.com/data-center-availability-suite.html

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https://www.veeam.com/vm-backup-recovery-replication-software.html

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Advanced ReFS Integration with Veeam Overview...Advanced ReFS Integration with Veeam Overview •...

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