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 consistently a

A CPU limit caps the VM's total CPU consumption but does not bind it to a single physical CPU, so it would not cause one CPU to be maxed while all others sit at 0%.

Enabling SMP in the guest OS causes the OS to schedule work across multiple CPUs, which is the opposite of the observed behavior where only one CPU is fully utilized.

CPU affinity restricts which physical CPUs the ESXi scheduler can use for the VM's vCPUs. If affinity is pinned to a single logical CPU such as CPU0, the scheduler cannot distribute the workload to other available CPUs regardless of their idle state. The consistently elevated %RDY confirms the VM is waiting for its pinned CPU to become free rather than being placed on an available one.

A CPU reservation guarantees a minimum CPU entitlement for the VM but places no constraint on which physical CPUs the scheduler may use, so it would not produce single-CPU saturation.