Microsoft’s file system ReFS is around for some time now. Windows 2012 already brought us the initial version almost six years ago. Still we had to wait till Windows Server 2016 appeared to get the real killer feature – at least as far as its usage for Veeam backups is concerned.
Continue reading “Veeam GFS on ReFS – how to see real storage consumption and your savings”Veeam ReFS Repository on iSCSI Targets
Troubleshooting Repository Deadlocks
With Resilient Filesystem (ReFS) integration into Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 a whole bunch of features was integrated. One of the biggest advantages is ‘Fast Cloning Technology’ which enables synthetic full backups by merely creating pointers to already existing datablocks on the repository.
In a small scale environment I had a hardware repository server (Win 2016) with an iSCSI Volume as repository (ReFS, 64k) as primary backup target. This constellation worked like a Swiss watch. Daily backups ran for months without any trouble. Fast cloning technology enabled weekly synthetic full backups with minimal consumption of extra space.
Recently I’ve added another iSCSI Volume (ReFS, 64k) to be used as repository for backup copies. That’s when the fun began… Continue reading “Veeam ReFS Repository on iSCSI Targets”
Query NTFS Blocksize
Using 64k blocksize for better performance
Partitions with Veeam-Backups, SQL-Database files or SQL-Logs should be formatted with a 64k blocksize for better performance. You can check blocksizes with a simple command.
Open a CMD Shell with Administrator rights.
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <Drive>
Example for the system partition.
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:
NTFS-Volumeseriennummer : 0xa892e42c92e400a4 Version : 3.1 Anzahl der Sektoren : 0x000000001dc807ff Gesamtzahl Cluster : 0x0000000003b900ff Freie Cluster : 0x0000000000b42c71 Insgesamt reserviert : 0x0000000000000ff0 Bytes pro Sektor : 512 Bytes pro physischen Sektor : 512 Bytes pro Cluster : 4096 Bytes pro Dateidatensatzsegment : 1024 Cluster pro Dateidatensatzsegment : 0 MFT-gültige Datenlänge : 0x0000000017180000 MFT-Start-LCN : 0x00000000000c0000 MFT2-Start-LCN : 0x0000000000000002 MFT-Zonenstart : 0x0000000000eb7240 MFT-Zonenende : 0x0000000000eb9340 RM-Bezeichner: FFFF0956-A102-11E7-87BD-005056C00008
You can see Bytes per Cluster: 4096 which equals 4KB.
Script
To check all local partitions for the corresponding blocksize you can use a PS script, which was originally posted by Stuart Moore.
$wql = "SELECT Label, Blocksize, Name FROM Win32_Volume WHERE FileSystem='NTFS'" Get-WmiObject -Query $wql -ComputerName '.' | Select-Object Label, Blocksize, Name
Links
Stuart Moore – Get Cluster size for all disks and volumes on a Windows machine using powershell and wmi