After reviewing this Blog and KBs from VMware, it appears that security wins again. VMware plans to disable Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) in all future releases.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2080735
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2097593
blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/01/assess-the-performance-impact-of-the-security-change-in-transparent-page-sharing-behaviour.html
*The above blog has a great GUI if you like GUIs. Below I will post some simple Powershell code if you like exporting to Excel etc. Quick note to Mark: Thank you for the script idea! Check out my Plink command below so you can reduce your SSH sessions in half. I also made some powershell commands so we don’t need to export and import text files. This script was able to scan over 500 ESXi hosts across seven vcenters in under seven minutes.
What this script does:
1 – Pulls all hosts in your vcenter and collects the name, clusterMoRef, and if its in lock down mode
2 – Pulls all clusters in your vcenter and collects the name, MoRef, and total memory allocated in the cluster.
3 – It then uses Plink.exe to SSH into every ESX host (that is not in lockdown mode) and run two commands.
4 – It returns those commands into a fancy report that can be exported to CSV.
From there, you can make some fancy calculations between total cluster memory and TPS savings. What I did was group all hosts by cluster, add up all of the “Free memory” reported by each host, then check if that number was smaller than the amount saved from TPS.
Thus : if (Free Mem < TPS saved) then {bad news}
#####################################
#edit the following four vars – then paste the code below it
###### The Vars:
cd e:\plink
$PuttyUser = “root”
$PuttyPwd = “salsa”
$avcenter = “MyvCenter”
##### The Code:
$Plink = “./plink.exe”
$cmd1 = ‘vsish -e get /memory/comprehensive‘
$cmd2 = ‘vsish -e get /memory/pshare/stats‘
$RCommand = ‘”‘ + $cmd1 + ‘ & ‘+ $cmd2 + ‘”‘
$report = @()
$clusterReport = @()
Add-PSSnapin VMware.*
connect-viserver $avcenter -User “administrator@vsphere.local” -password “salsa”
$hostlist = get-view -viewtype hostsystem -property name,Parent,config | select name,parent -expandproperty config | where {$_.admindisabled -ne $true} | select name,parent
$allclusters = get-view -viewtype ClusterComputeResource -property name,summary | select name,moref -expandproperty summary | select name,moref,totalmemory
$clusterReport += $allclusters
foreach($hostname in $hostlist.name){
echo Y | ./plink.exe -l $PuttyUser -pw $PuttyPwd $hostname exit
$command = $Plink + ” -v -batch -pw ” + “`””+$PuttyPwd + ”`” -l ” + $PuttyUser + “ ” + $hostname + ” ” + $RCommand
$data1 = “”
$data1 = Invoke-Expression -command $command
$VMKernelMem = ((($data1 | where {$_ -match “Given to VMKernel”}).split(‘:’)[1]) -replace ‘kb’) / 1048576
$FreeMem = ((($data1 | where {$_ -match “Free:”}).split(‘:’)[1]) -replace ‘kb’) / 1048576
$Pageshared = ($data1 | where {$_ -match “psharing”}).split(‘:’)[1]
$PageZero = ($data1 | where {$_ -match “zero-pages”}).split(‘:’)[1]
if($pageshared -gt 0){$Pageshared=[math]::Round((([int]$Pageshared*4)/1048576),2)}
if($pageZero -gt 0){$pageZero=[math]::Round((([int]$Pagezero*4)/1048576),2)}
$row = “” | select vcenter,cluster,hostname,VMKernelMemGB,FreeMemGB,PagesharedGB,PageZeroGB
$row.vcenter = $avcenter
$row.cluster = ($allclusters | where {$_.moref.value -match ($hostlist | where {$_.name -match $hostname} | %{$_.parent.value})}).name
$row.hostname = $hostname
$row.VMKernelMemGB = $VMKernelMem
$row.FreeMemGB = $FreeMem
$row.PagesharedGB = $Pageshared
$row.PageZeroGB = $PageZero
$report += $row
}
Disconnect-viserver -confirm:$False
$report | export-csv c:\temp\TPSHostdata.csv
$clusterReport | select name,totalmemory | export-csv c:\temp\TPSClusterData.csv