as mentioned by Matt - the ready time high value is not only due to CPU contention ..also if there is high disk latency.. then also it will appear..
so check the STORAGE section from the esxtop... and refer the http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279 for more details..
disk latency can cause all mess..in the vsphere...
"%WAIT"
The percentage of time the world spent in wait state.
This %WAIT is the total wait time. I.e., the world is waiting for some VMKernel resource. This wait time includes I/O wait time, idle time and among other resources. Idle time is presented as %IDLE.
+Q: How do I know the VCPU world is waiting for I/O events?+
+A: %WAIT - %IDLE can give you an estimate on how much CPU time is spent in waiting I/O events. This is an estimate only, because the world may be waiting for resources other than I/O.+ +Note that we should only do this for VMM worlds, not the other kind of worlds. Because VMM worlds represent the guest behavior the best. For disk I/O, another alternative is to read the disk latency stats which we will explain in the disk section.+
+Q: How do I know the VM group is waiting for I/O events?+
+A: For a VM, there are other worlds besides the VCPUs, such as a mks world and a VMX world. Most of time, the other worlds are waiting for events. So, you will see ~100% %WAIT for those worlds. If you want to know whether the guest is waiting for I/O events, you'd better expand the group and analyze the VCPU worlds as stated above.+
+Since %IDLE makes no sense to the worlds other than VCPUs, we may use the group stats to estimate the guest I/O wait by "%WAIT - %IDLE - 100% * (NWLD - NVCPU)". Here, NWLD is the number of worlds in the group; NVCPU is the number of VCPUs. This is a very rough estimate, due to two reasons. (1) The world may be waiting for resources other than I/O. (2) We assume the other assisting worlds are not active, which may not be true.+
