SNMP - Value of CPU processor load not reflecting reality

Try using the the stress utility to generate load in Linux, please. It's very granular and makes more sense than what you're doing.

What I see you doing is generating a single-threaded I/O load on a 4-CPU virtual machine. The CPU graph you pasted-in from the vSphere client shows a 25% load because you're only straining one of the four CPU's assigned to the virtual machine.

Download stress (which is available for most Linux distributions) and try with some specific parameters...

For instance, simply running the following on a 4-CPU virtual machine:

# stress -c 4
stress: info: [594013] dispatching hogs: 4 cpu, 0 io, 0 vm, 0 hdd

yields...

Vmware doesn't collect this information, and there's really no good way for it to do so. The problem is that it has no way to know when you're going to ask -- so in order to make this work, it would have to always have an average ready for the past sixty seconds. Since you might ask now and then ask a second later, it would have to properly count the CPU time forty seconds ago towards both intervals. That's a really ugly, complicated thing to do.

Supporting this would add a high cost as the SNMP agent would have to constantly probe the CPU usage and update multiple intervals all running at the same time.