On my Intel hosts, I have always selected High-Performance power settings on every ESXi host that I have configured throughout my career, but I have a couple cases where Balanced power may be more beneficial to get that burst of speed that would not be possible otherwise.
Let me backtrack a little… did you know that turbo mode is disabled when High-Performance is selected on vSphere? Yes, that is correct. You lose that burst of speed, but you gain consistency. Your host will also consume more power since it will deliver it continuously to each CPU to support the base clock speed for each core.
What about applications that are mainly single threaded though? Yep, that is the one time where Balanced power settings and higher clock speeds for a limited amount of time may make sense, in my opinion. But what applications are single threaded nowadays, and why? Supposedly there are still some around that rely mainly on a single CPU to do most of the work, and the rest are leveraged for other surrounding tasks.
What are your vSphere power preferences? Are you an Intel Turbo fan? Or would you rather have the consistency instead?
Testing CPU Max Turbo Boost Frequency in ESXi – https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/80610
Interested in a deeper dive? Check out this book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort
