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.
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
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.
Hi,
Not sure if it is still supported, but try the setting (set to TRUE instead of FALSE) as is documented here:
This might also be of interest:
https://www.vladan.fr/performance-best-practices-for-vmware-workstation/
--
Wil
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.
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
Finally I asked to official support and they replied that it does not support it.
Thanks for your help.
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