Transparent Page Sharing in Workstation?

[Donoban]

Hi,

I run some windows virtual machines in a Workstation and I am pretty confused about 'free' output:

	total	used	free	shared	buffers	cached
Mem:	59G	58G	576M	46G	146M	51G
-/+ buffers/cache:		6,8G	52G
Swap:	71G	344M	71G

Since 'used' without 'cached' is 6.8G, I assumed, until some days ago, that TPS was enabled and a lot of memory was deduplicated between my many windows VM's.

But after some problems running more VM's, and the OOM killer appearing when I disable swap, I think that TPS is not working, is it available for Workstation? If yes, how can I enable it?

I would like to know exactly why the used/cache values are so confusing when running vmware virtual machines.

Thanks.

[wila]

Hi,

I don't think that Workstation has TPS, but I might be wrong.

See also this thread of a discussion of TPS on VMware desktop products:

Transparent Page Sharing or equivalent

edit:

and the OOM killer appearing when I disable swap

Disabled what swap?

Disabled swap at the host OS?

Disabled swap at the guest OS?

Disabled swap at VMware level?

--

Wil

[Donoban]

edit:

and the OOM killer appearing when I disable swap

Disabled what swap?

Disabled swap at the host OS?

Disabled swap at the guest OS?

Disabled swap at VMware level?

I disabled the swap at host OS (Debian Jessie). With swap enabled it got stuck for loooooong time (until I force reboot). So definitely I was running out of ram because I wrongly assumed that TPS was working and I had tons of free memory.

I think that I will migrate to ESXI but I would like to know if Workstation supports TPS or not.

Since all my VM's are 'trusted', I don't mind the security considerations about TPS.

[wila]

Hi,

Not sure if it is still supported, but try the setting (set to TRUE instead of FALSE) as is documented here:

Disk I/O Performance Tips

This might also be of interest:

https://www.vladan.fr/performance-best-practices-for-vmware-workstation/

--

Wil

[Donoban]

Hi,

I read both before opening this thread and I feel that currently they are just ignored. There are no errors, no notification about them and same behavior so probably it's obsolete.

Thanks for your effort.

[wila]

Hi,

Only a VMware employee can tell for sure if memory page sharing is still supported.

Perhaps Mikero​ can help in tracking down the person who knows, perhaps he even knows himself.

--

Wil

[Donoban]

Finally I asked to official support and they replied that it does not support it.

Thanks for your help.

[wila]

Ah OK, that explains it then.

Thanks for letting us all know that the vmx setting sched.mem.pshare.enable is no longer used.

--

Wil