Hi all,
So I've been playing around with the new storage spaces, de-duplication & thin provisioning features in Server 2012. So far I have to say the results have been confusing, frustrating and downright disappointing. I have found a handful of people who have had similer experiences.
In my current experience, the way that server 2012 attempts to free up spans of data on a storage pool is completely useless resulting in masses of wasted physical storage space. If you take 1000gb or so of data. Delete half of it, then copy half back on. What you end up with is ~1300GB of allocated space!! De-duplicate the data and the problem is massively amplified due to the way spans on the storage pool are allocated and free'd up. I have tried many methods of optimizing, triming etc... but have yet to find a way of reclaiming back the used physical space. I currently have a test volume that is storing 1TB of data which is "using" 3.6TB of space!!!
- Are Microsoft aware of these shortcomings?
- Is this documented behavior anywhere?
- If de-duplication causes this much trouble, why is it allowed on a thin provisioned storage pool.
- Are Microsoft planning to rectify or make the process of freeing up allocated spans better or more visible?
- Is the thin provisioning a late afterthought and just not ready for production use?
I love server 2012, I love hyper-v, I love what storage spaces can do, but in its present incarnation it is clearly not a feature I can recommend for production environments (despite the insane performance, good job on that btw!!)