When monitoring the guest o/s via perfmon we see a large proportion of CPU time spent in priviledge mode, actually it is fairly high on the physical as well but much higher on the VM. Roughly 80% of the CPU time seems to be spent in priv mode as opposed to physical server which is around 50%. There is very little paging occurring. Having trouble understanding why so much time is being spent in non-user mode. It is possible that a lot of floating-point calculations are being done - does a VM get direct access to Floating point unit or does hypervisor capture and do s/w translation? If so does that count toward priv mode or user mode?