I had been troubleshooting a stubborn CPU utilization issue with a workload that, over time would also overrun the CPU on my physical ESX host. The assumption was that the workload was causing the issue, but after several rounds of collecting various ESX performance statistics, there was nothing conclusive that the workload was the culprit.
An interesting observation from some of the ESXi VMkernel Engineering team was that my VMkernel log contained a large number entropy errors:
NRandomHwrng: 246: Out of entropy, refreshing
The engineering team suspected that these entropy issues could actually be the root cause of the issues I had observed, especially as they have seen something simliar in another case when entropy requests fail.
