Sudden Spike in CPU resource noticed on all the ESXi Hosts in the Environment

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

A sudden spike in the CPU resource noticed on all ESXi Hosts in the environment.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

We noticed that the spike occurred every week at exactly the same time. Further investigation revealed that the internal security team was performing a security scan on the entire environment at the same time.

Resolution

The resource-intensive nature of the weekly security scan, when run simultaneously across all hosts, directly correlated with and was the direct cause of the observed spike in host CPU utilization. Please work with your internal Security team to figure out a plan to perform a scan without the spike.