What does fault tolerance in VMware provide?

Fault tolerance in VMware provides continuous availability via a live shadow instance. This feature ensures that in the event of a hardware failure or other disruptions affecting a virtual machine (VM), there is an immediately available copy of the VM running in parallel, known as a shadow VM. This means that the primary VM and its shadow instance operate simultaneously, allowing for seamless failover without any noticeable downtime to the end-users. This is particularly critical for business-critical applications where uptime is essential.

The other options do not accurately describe fault tolerance. Scheduled backups of VMs focus on data protection and recovery, but they do not provide the immediate continuity of service that fault tolerance offers. Increased network throughput for VMs relates to network performance rather than availability and does not contribute to maintaining VM operations during a failure. Automatic repair of corrupted VM files refers to system recovery rather than ongoing operational availability, which is not within the scope of fault tolerance.