Analysing Performance Effects of Deduplication on Virtual Machine Storage

Virtualization is a widely used technology for running multiple operating systems on a single set of hardware. Virtual machines running the same operating system have been shown to have a large amount of identical data, in such cases deduplication have been shown to be very effective in eliminating duplicated data. This study aimed to investigate if the storage savings are as large as shown in previous research, as well as to investigate if there are any negative performance impacts when using deduplication. The selected performance variables are resource utilisation and disk performance. The selected deduplication implementations are SDFS and ZFS deduplication. Each file system is tested with its respective non-deduplicated file systems, ext4 and ZFS. The results show that the storage savings are between 72,5 % and 73,65 % while the resource utilisation is generally higher when using deduplication. The results also show that deduplication using SDFS has an overall large negative disk performance impact, while ZFS deduplication has a general disk performance increase