Hey so I figured it out.  For some reason the memory was the bottleneck.  I stopped the vm and upped the mem to 30 from 4 (GBs) and restarted and now its running like a champ.  Wanted you to know so you let others know.  Thanks so much for your help.

Thank you for your response - I did run btc core on a windows machine last year and the IBD/Sync process was tons faster on a worse (Core I5 6th gen) processor.  That PC did have an SSD however where the current VM is assigned a non SSD HD. 

Hi,

My IBD/Sync is going terribly slowly.  Have a gigabit connection and a 20 core Xenon CPU running @2.8 GHz

I see that less than 3% of my cpu processes are being used (verified on Vsphere and via system monitor on the linux VM).  Anyone have any thoughts on how I can get bitcoin core to use my full CPU resources?

I have all 20 cores allocated to the linux (ubuntu) machine as well as 4GB of memory.

Thanks for any help total nube here (BTC core / Linux / ESXI)