Due to a policy change, a few of a customer's application VMs have been migrated to synchronously replicated storage. The customer now reports that performance is lower. The systems administrator…

CPU utilization at 60% is well below saturation, so insufficient vCPU allocation cannot explain the observed performance degradation.

With CPU at 60% and 30% of memory still available, neither compute resource is saturated, which rules out hardware bottlenecks as the cause. Synchronous replication requires every write to be acknowledged by all replicas before the I/O is confirmed, and the application may not be designed to tolerate the resulting write-path overhead, making it functionally incompatible with the new storage configuration.

Although synchronous replication does inherently add I/O latency, the resource metrics show no saturation point that would make raw latency the primary root cause over application incompatibility.

With 30% memory still available the VM is not memory-constrained, so underallocation of memory is not driving the performance issue.