I've been playing around with Backup Exec 2012 for a bit trying to tweak deduplication to a usable performance level. I use BE 2012 running on Server 2008 R2 standard, 2 procs, 32 GB of usable RAM. We back up about 3 TB straight from a MAC OSX server, and 7TB from windows virtual machines on VMWare.
I have found in some places that 32KB dedup blocks are optimal for VMWare, but nothing in Backup Exec or VMWare best practices guidelines. Can anyone confirm that this would actually help me if I switch from 128KB blocks to 32KB, or if it is a null factor? I am looking for the best settings for both performance and dedup ratio, but heavier on performance since right now dedup jobs are 1/3 the speed of a normal B2D software compressed job.