ReFS deduplication

While filesystems and deduplication features are technologies that you may not expect to be discussed when it comes to Hyper-V, the improvements in Server 2019 and 2022 related to ReFS and the deduplication of data carry some huge advantages for Hyper-V Servers. In case these are unfamiliar terms, let’s take a minute and define ReFS and deduplication.

ReFS

Anyone who has worked on computers for a while will recognize FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. These are filesystems that can be used when formatting hard drives. The different versions of filesystems translate into different capabilities of how you can utilize that hard drive. For a number of years, NTFS has been the de facto standard for all hard disks connected to Windows machines.

That is until Windows Server 2016 came along. We now have a new filesystem option called ReFS. Even if you work in an IT department every day, you may have never heard of ReFS because, so far, it isn’t getting used...