A recent research study has unveiled a security risk in Transparent Page Sharing (TPS), as acknowledged by VMware in kb2080735.
The researchers were able to discover that from a virtual machine A, an AES encryption key could be retrieved from machine B. While the steps to achieve this seem difficult to reproduce, the risk is real. In fact, the risk is so real that VMware decided to disable TPS for all future versions of ESXi, as well as all current versions for the next update release.
For example, version 5.5 is currently in update 2: TPS will be disabled with update 3. More exactly, inter-vm page sharing will be disabled per default. Pages can still be deduplicated within a virtual machine world, for a much smaller benefit of course.
Until these new releases hit the market, patches are available for those who wish to disable TPS in versions 5.5 and 5.1. And a patch is coming for version 5.0.