Why does vSphere show >100% consumed host CPU across my VM's?

[maxwellmaurice]

I am running tests with VM's competing for resources and I get sums of around 115% - 125% consumed CPU. Does anyone know why this would happen?

ESXI v6.7

[vXav]

Hi,

It's a bit confusing a graph but you are looking at the consumption of the VM vCPU. If the VM has 2Ghz and uses 1GHz, it will show up as 50%, even though the host CPU could be used at 5%.

If you compare those values with the CPU usage of the VM itself you will see they are identical.

One of the lines in this graph should be the host itself, that's where you get the host CPU consumption.

To get an idea of the VM CPU consumption relative to each other you could change the unit to MHz instead of % (not sure you can do that in the ESXi client though).