Just discovered that one of the patches I installed today on my VMWare hosts fixed an issue I had after installing Symantec Endpoint Protection for Small Business Cloud Hosted Edition

The old ESXi build was 106549 the new one is 3872664 ( vSphere 5.1 3b )

I don't know exactly which patch fixed it because I used VMWare Update Manager to do the installation.

After the upgrade and migrating my VM's back to the new server the CPU usage of the NIS.exe component in the SEP Client is now within acceptable limits.

Yay!