Can an ESX server under heavy load cause cpu spikes on guest VM's?

Posted by ReferentiallySeethru on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by ReferentiallySeethru
Published on 2011-11-18T17:47:04Z Indexed on 2011/11/18 17:53 UTC
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virtualization

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vmware-esx

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cpu-usage

So we have a number of vm's running on an ESX 4.1 server for product testing. The ESX Server is at times under heavy load. We've been experiencing high CPU levels during some use cases, but we can't always duplicate this. If the ESX server as a whole is under heavy load could this cause guest machines to show high CPU usage?

To ask it a different way, if the guest machines require more cpu resources than the server has, how does this affect CPU usage as indicated by the OS and process?

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