Below is a link to a post on cisco's support forums for the VM datastore latency that I have been troubleshooting on our system for a few weeks now. I've tried to keep the post as organized/detailed as possible. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry if this is a faux-pas for linking to another forum but its cleaner to have on location for all the things i've done. Again, thanks for taking the time to read/research!
https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12755971/vm-datastore-latency