What does the term "vMotion" refer to in VMware?

The term "vMotion" refers to the process of moving a running virtual machine (VM) from one physical host to another without any downtime. This feature enables seamless migration of workloads between hosts within a VMware environment, allowing for load balancing, hardware maintenance, and the optimization of resources without disrupting users or applications.

vMotion leverages shared storage and the underlying VMware infrastructure to facilitate this migration, ensuring that the state of the VM—its memory, CPU, and network connections—are preserved during the move. This capability is essential in managing virtualized environments, as it contributes to increased availability and better resource allocation, ultimately enhancing the overall efficiency of the data center operations.

In contrast, the other options refer to different processes. Creating snapshots, for instance, is about preserving the current state of a VM at a specific point in time, which does not involve migrating the VM itself. Backing up a powered-off VM and restoring from a backup are separate data protection strategies entirely, not related to the dynamic, live migration capabilities that vMotion provides.