This week one of my customer asked me about TPS setting and he said TPS was very good now since it has been disabled what else can be done to achieve memory saving techniques in vSphere 6. so i hv explained him that TPS has been disabled for Inter-VM but Intra-VM is still working and there are few alternative ways by which you can enable Intra-VM TPS. so thought of sharing this with you all , to clarify what has been disabled and what is available and what can be done to achieve Intra-VM TPS.

So Basically Transparent page sharing allows multiple virtual machines to share pages when the pages are identical.In vSphere 6, intra-VM TPS ( pages within the VM )is enabled by default and inter-VM TPS (pages across VMs) is disabled by default, due to some security concerns as described in VMware KB2080735.

to over come the security issue , the concept of salting has been introduced, which can be used to control and manage the virtual machine participating in TPS. Earlier for two Virtual machines to share pages, the contents of the pages should be same. With the concept of salting, along with the content of the pages, the salt values for the two virtual machines should be same.

Salting is used to allow more granular management of the virtual machines participating in TPS than was previously possible. As per the original TPS implementation, multiple virtual machines could share pages when the contents of the pages were same. With the new salting settings, the virtual machines can share pages only if the salt value and contents of the pages are identical. A new host config option Mem.ShareForceSalting is introduced to enable or disable salting.

By default, salting is enabled (Mem.ShareForceSalting=2) and each virtual machine has a different salt. This means page sharing does not occur across the virtual machines (inter-VM TPS) and only happens inside a virtual machine (intra VM).

When salting is enabled (Mem.ShareForceSalting=1 or 2) in order to share a page between two virtual machines both salt and the content of the page must be same. A salt value is a configurable vmx option for each virtual machine. You can manually specify the salt values in the virtual machine’s vmx file with the new vmx option sched.mem.pshare.salt. If this option is not present in the virtual machine’s vmx file, then the value of vc.uuid vmx option is taken as the default value. Since the vc.uuid is unique to each virtual machine, by default TPS happens only among the pages belonging to a particular virtual machine (Intra-VM).If a group of virtual machines are considered trustworthy, it is possible to share pages among them by setting a common salt value for all those virtual machines (inter-VM).

The following table shows how different settings for TPS are used together to effect how TPS operates for individual virtual machines:

Comments are welcome and Happy learning 🙂