Support for Large Page Sizes

ESXi provides limited support for large page sizes.

x86 architecture allows system software to use 4KB, 2MB and 1GB pages. We refer to 4KB pages as small pages while 2MB and 1GB pages are referred to as large pages. Large pages relieve translation lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure and reduce the cost of page table walks, which results in improved workload performance.

In virtualized environments, large pages can be used by the hypervisor and the guest operating system independently. While the biggest performance impact is achieved if large pages are used by the guest and the hypervisor, in most cases a performance impact can be observed even if large pages are used only at the hypervisor level.

ESXi hypervisor uses 2MB pages for backing guest vRAM by default. vSphere 6.7 ESXi provides a limited support for backing guest vRAM with 1GB pages. For more information, see Backing Guest vRAM with 1GB Pages.