Many ESXi workloads present opportunities for sharing memory across virtual machines (as well as within a single virtual machine).
ESXi memory sharing runs as a background activity that scans for sharing opportunities over time. The amount of memory saved varies over time. For a fairly constant workload, the amount generally increases slowly until all sharing opportunities are exploited.
To determine the effectiveness of memory sharing for a given workload, try running the workload, and use resxtop or esxtop to observe the actual savings. Find the information in the PSHARE field of the interactive mode in the Memory page.
Use the Mem.ShareScanTime and Mem.ShareScanGHz advanced settings to control the rate at which the system scans memory to identify opportunities for sharing memory.
You can also configure sharing for individual virtual machines by setting the sched.mem.pshare.enable option.
Due to security concerns, inter-virtual machine transparent page sharing is deactivated by default and page sharing is being restricted to intra-virtual machine memory sharing. This means page sharing does not occur across virtual machines and only occurs inside of a virtual machine. The concept of salting has been introduced to help address concerns system administrators may have over the security implications of transparent page sharing. Salting can be used to allow more granular management of the virtual machines participating in transparent page sharing than was previously possible. With the new salting settings, virtual machines can share pages only if the salt value and contents of the pages are identical. A new host config option Mem.ShareForceSalting can be configured to activate or deactivate salting.
See Advanced Attributes for information on how to set advanced options.
