What does fault tolerance in VMware provide?

Fault tolerance in VMware is designed to ensure continuous availability of virtual machines (VMs) in the event of a hardware failure or other disruptions. When fault tolerance is enabled, it creates a live shadow instance of the primary VM, essentially duplicating it in real-time. This means that if the primary VM were to experience a failure, the shadow instance can immediately take over without any interruption to services or data loss. This seamless failover capability is critical for maintaining high levels of uptime and reliability in mission-critical applications.

The other options do not capture the essence of what fault tolerance specifically provides. Scheduled backups help in data recovery but do not facilitate immediate availability during failures. Increased network throughput addresses performance rather than availability during outages. Automatic repair of corrupted VM files concerns data integrity but lacks the proactive availability features intrinsic to fault tolerance technology.