How to revert new Transparent Page Sharing behaviour

There have been a lot of blog posts around warning us that starting from vSphere 5.5 Update2d (build 2403361) TPS will be basically turned off.

Besides comments about the why and how to partially re-enable inter-VM TPS I just think in most cases it might make sense to restore the original behaviour; I have been in the process of upgrading an infrastructure where the RAM contrain represented a much bigger concearn than the specific security reason why TPS has been turned off so I decided to take a look at the shared memory metrics in vCenter just to find out that post-upgrade situation wouldn’t be exactly heavenly if all the shared memory pages would be translated into unique pages.

I found this arcicle KB2097593 where it explains the various status of the settings you can apply and one of them basically disables the new behaviour restoring the old fashion TPS:

In other words setting the value “ShareForceSalting” to 0 will bring things back in time.

The complete procedure is as follows:

1. Log in to ESX (i)/vCenter with the VI-Client.
2. Select ESX (i) relevant host.
3. In the Configuration tab, click Advanced Settings (link) under the software section.
4. In the Advanced Settings window, click Mem.
5. Search for Mem.ShareForceSalting and set the value to 0.
6. Click OK.
7. Reboot host