Hi michaelosity, and welcome to the VMware Communities!
The sample log you attached suggests that your virtual machine was doing a lot of disk I/O. Are you sure that it's not just some background task within the guest OS that's indexing the disk, or defragmenting, or doing a backup or a cloud sync? Keep in mind that, on an SSD, anything that is "disk intensive" will quickly generate close to 100% CPU utilization because the I/O latency is so very low.
It might help to go into VM Settings> Advanced, and set Troubleshooting to Performance, then reproduce the problem and upload the resulting vmware.log from inside the virtual machine's bundle. That can sometimes give us good clues as to why a virtual machine is not performing as expected.
Cheers,
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Darius