Transparent page sharing with Windows 2008 and 2003 VMs

[ferdis]

Hi, please is there some official VMware statement or explanation that Transparent page sharing is working even you have multiple types of OS like Windows? For example Win 2003 and 2008 VMs on same hypervisor?

[schepp]

Hi,

I don't remember any statement it doesn't work.

When you simplify the TPS, it does the following: It hashes the pages. If there are hash-matches it does a scan of both pages to exclude a false hash-match. The OS shouldn't matter.

Also see from the vSphere memory management whitepaper:

For example, several virtual machines may be running the same guest operating system, have the same applications, or contain the same user data

Regards

[rickardnobel]

Frantisek Ferencik wrote:

is there some official VMware statement or explanation that Transparent page sharing is working even you have multiple types of OS like Windows? For example Win 2003 and 2008 VMs on same hypervisor?

As noted above there are no real dependency to the guest operating system, I even think that TPS does not know what kind of guest it is.

However, the possibility to find matching pages (expect zero pages) is of course extremely much larger if the OS are the same.