An administrator observes the following symptoms for a virtual machine: - CPU usage is consistently above 90% - CPU ready value is consistently above 20%. - Application performance is impacted. Which

Adding vCPUs to a VM on an already CPU-contended host worsens CPU ready because the scheduler must simultaneously find the same number of free physical cores for co-scheduling, making placement harder and increasing wait time.

Reducing vCPUs lowers the total CPU capacity available to the VM; since CPU usage is already above 90%, fewer vCPUs would further starve the workload and degrade application performance rather than help.

VMware Tools installs paravirtual drivers including vmmemctl and VMCI that allow the hypervisor to accurately detect idle states and reclaim resources from other VMs; without it on all VMs, the host cannot efficiently schedule CPU time and overall contention - reflected in CPU ready - remains elevated for the affected VM.

CPU shares determine relative scheduling priority when the host is CPU-constrained; increasing shares for this VM causes the ESXi scheduler to grant it physical CPU time sooner during contention, directly lowering the CPU ready metric.