The counters at the ESXi level are naturally similar to the ones at the VM level, as the hypervisor is also an OS. The key difference is that there are counters that are not applicable to ESXi hosts, such as Entitlement, Max Limited, and System. The values at the hypervisor level reflect the aggregate value of all VMs in the host plus the hypervisor's own workload. The hypervisor generates its own workload; for example, vMotion, cloning, and other tasks. Kernel modules such as Virtual SAN also take up CPU resources.

Unlike VMs, which have 16 counters for CPU, ESXi comes with 14 counters for CPU. Also, unlike VM, which provides 11 counters at CPU core level, ESXi only provides 5 counters at CPU core level. The remaining 9 counters that are not available at the core level are as follows:

This means you will not be able to track contention at the physical core level...