An administrator is troubleshooting a CPU issue for a virtual machine. The following is seen in esxtop: - CPU0 is at 100% usage - The remaining logical CPUs are close to 0% - %RDY value is consistentl

A CPU limit throttles total CPU consumption across all eligible CPUs rather than pinning execution to one, so other logical CPUs would also show elevated usage instead of sitting near 0%.

Configuring SMP in the guest OS enables the guest to utilize multiple vCPUs simultaneously, which would spread load across multiple logical CPUs rather than concentrating it on CPU0.

CPU affinity restricts which physical CPUs a VM's vCPUs are allowed to run on. When CPU0 is the only CPU in the affinity set and is fully saturated, the VM is forced to wait for CPU0 to become available rather than being scheduled on any idle CPU, producing both the single-CPU saturation and the elevated %RDY seen in esxtop.

A CPU reservation guarantees a minimum CPU allocation to the VM but does not restrict which physical CPUs it may run on, so it would not cause other CPUs to idle.