I’m in the early stages of testing TrueNAS Scale for the sole purpose of being an on-premise Veeam backup repository. Right now Veeam is taking weekly backups of our VMware VM’s and using a Copy Job, sending them to the TrueNAS server, with a GFS retention of 53 weeklies. The idea is that besides our storage snapshots, and regular monthly backup that go to AWS, the TrueNAS repository could act as an on-premise repository to do VM or file level restores, instead of having to retrieve from AWS.
We’re already doing this with a Windows Server VM, with Dedup configured on the storage volume. I wanted to see if ZFS dedup was any better than Windows dedup and created a new TrueNAS Scale 24.04 server. I have a dataset setup for the Veeam repository and configured dedup on it. So far after 3 weeks I’m seeing a 2.09x dedup factor on the data, which seems pretty good so far.
My question is, can I setup a 2nd TrueNAS Scale server with identical hardware, and replicate the dedup data to the other server? Essentially ending up with 2 copies of the same data?
I know this is possible with standard Dataset’s, but I’m unsure of whether a Dataset with dedup can be replicated as the Dedup VDEV isn’t being replicated, and that is critical for the data contained within the Dedup Dataset.
Or will the data be re-hydrated, replicated, and then on the other end I have another Dedup VDEV and Dataset with dedup configured for the destination?
Any insight would be appreciated.