Many ESXi workloads present opportunities for sharing memory across virtual machines.
You might have multiple virtual machines running instances of the same guest operating system, have the same applications or components loaded, or contain common data. In such cases, ESXi systems use a proprietary transparent page-sharing technique to eliminate redundant copies of memory pages. With memory sharing, a workload running in virtual machines often consumes less memory than it might when running on physical machines. As a result, higher levels of overcommitment can be supported efficiently.
Transparent page sharing for ESXi systems has also been optimized for use on NUMA systems. On NUMA systems, pages are shared per-node, so each NUMA node has its own local copy of heavily shared pages. When virtual machines use shared pages, they do not need access to remote memory.
