Mounting A Server 2012 R2 Deduped Volume in Server 2016

Server 2016 includes a number of improvements to deduplication, which left me a wondering whether a deduped volume created in Server 2012 R2 can be mounted and read by Server 2016. Why would you want to do this? Well, my experience has been that dedupe in 2012 isn’t fantastic, and definitely struggles with larger files (approaching 1TB and beyond). Server 2016 on the other hand has shown to be far more performant.

I Googled and found nothing.

Long story short, I had an opportunity to put it to the test, and the answer is: Yes it can. I was able to mount the (iSCSI) volume, and read the data. I did no further testing, take this as a starting point and nothing else.