An architect is tasked with reviewing the design of a VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) for a software development company. The platform is used to developing applications and services. It is important that the customer be able to accurately benchmark performance of developed applications.

The platform has recently commissioned new hosts to update the development cluster.

The development cluster host configuration is:

4 ESXi hosts with 2 sockets × 16 cores

512 GB RAM divided evenly between sockets

There is no resource contention

The benchmarking cluster host configuration is:

8 ESXi hosts with 2 sockets × 8 cores

256 GB RAM divided evenly between sockets

There is no resource contention

The customer is developing an application that includes a database virtual machine. The application developer states that the database virtual machine performs as required only when allocated 8 vCPUs 256 GB RAM. The database virtual machine performance meets the required levels when run from the development cluster. Performance benchmarking for the database virtual machine yields highly variable results when run from the benchmarking cluster. The application cannot be released without reliable performance benchmarking data.

What is a possible reason for the difference in performance test results between the development and benchmarking clusters?