Increased %sys usage for a KVM Guest after upgrading to a RHEL 7.3 (or newer) based hypervisor

Issue

• After migrating a KVM Guest from a RHEL 7.2 (or earlier) based hypervisor to a RHEL 7.3 (or newer) based one, %sys usage for the process backing the VM on the Host is significantly higher than before.
• This symptom is more visible when running applications in the Guest which sleep frequently and for short amounts of time.