An administrator has received reports of high CPU ready times on several Virtual Machines (VMs)...

To collect detailed per-VM CPU metrics—especiallyCPU Ready (%RDY)—the correct command-line utility on an ESXi host isesxtop. This tool provides real-time, low-level performance data for CPU, memory, disk, and network usage, and is the authoritative method for diagnosing CPU contention issues in VMware environments.

When troubleshootinghigh CPU Ready times, esxtop allows administrators to:

View CPU contention at the VM level

Inspect co-stop, wait, and scheduling delays

Monitor NUMA distribution and pCPU saturation

Capture historical performance snapshots using batch mode

The other options do not provide the necessary VM-level CPU scheduling metrics:

A. vimtop: Only available on vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), not ESXi; doesnotshow VM CPU ready.

B. esxcli: Used for configuration and health checks; not for real-time CPU metrics.

C. vim-cmd: Used to manage VMs via vSphere API bindings; not a performance monitoring tool.