A VMware administrator determines that a low priority virtual machine is negatively affecting the disk I/O performance of a higher priority virtual machine. The virtual machines are hosted on the same

Disk shares in vSphere set the relative priority for I/O access when contention exists on the same datastore and host. By increasing the share value assigned to the high priority VM, the ESXi scheduler allocates a proportionally larger portion of available I/O operations per second to it compared to the low priority VM, directly resolving the performance impact during periods of contention.

Migrating the low priority VM to another host would resolve the contention only if the datastore is also different or exclusively accessible - if both hosts share the same datastore, I/O contention at the storage layer can still occur.

Storage Profiles (VM Storage Policies) are used to match VMs to datastores based on capabilities such as replication or encryption, not to arbitrate I/O priority between VMs sharing a datastore.

VAAI offloads specific storage operations like cloning and zeroing to the array to reduce host CPU overhead, but it does not provide per-VM I/O prioritization or resolve contention between competing workloads.