CV0-004 Troubleshooting Practice Question
A cloud administrator receives an alert that a virtual machine (VM) is unresponsive. The VM is hosted on a hypervisor that shows high CPU ready time. Which of the following is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse high CPU ready time with high CPU usage or memory pressure, but ready time is a hypervisor-level scheduling delay, not a guest OS metric, and is directly tied to vCPU over-provisioning.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Over-provisioning of vCPUs on the hypervisor
High CPU ready time indicates that the VM is ready to execute instructions but is waiting for the hypervisor to schedule physical CPU time. This is a classic symptom of over-provisioning vCPUs, where the total number of vCPUs assigned to all VMs exceeds the available physical cores, causing contention at the hypervisor scheduler level.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Insufficient memory allocated to the VM
Why it's wrong here
High CPU ready time measures time a vCPU waits for a physical core, so the bottleneck is processor scheduling, not RAM. Insufficient memory would instead surface as ballooning, swapping or guest-level paging pressure. Memory sizing is the right focus when a VM is starved of RAM, but it cannot explain scheduler wait.
- ✗
Network latency between the VM and storage
Why it's wrong here
CPU ready time reflects vCPU scheduling delay on the physical host, so storage-path latency is irrelevant to that counter. Network latency between VM and storage would show as elevated datastore or I/O latency, not scheduler wait. Investigating the storage fabric is correct when latency traces to the datastore path.
- ✗
Disk I/O contention from other VMs
Why it's wrong here
Disk I/O contention would raise datastore latency and disk queue depth, not CPU ready time, which counts vCPU wait for a physical core. Storage contention is the right suspect when VMs stall on I/O while processor scheduling stays healthy. The stem's metric points squarely at CPU oversubscription.
- ✓
Over-provisioning of vCPUs on the hypervisor
Why this is correct
High CPU ready time means vCPUs wait in the hypervisor's run queue before receiving physical CPU cycles. Over-provisioning vCPUs across guests on the same host oversubscribes physical cores, so each VM waits longer, presenting as an unresponsive guest.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CV0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CV0-004 exam.