What does the vSphere High Availability (HA) feature enable for virtual machines?

The vSphere High Availability (HA) feature is designed specifically to improve the availability and reliability of virtual machines in a VMware environment. When a host failure occurs, HA automatically detects the failure and restarts the affected virtual machines on other available hosts within the cluster. This minimizes downtime and ensures that applications remain accessible, enhancing the overall resilience of the virtual infrastructure.

The automatic restart capability is fundamental to HA's role in providing business continuity. By quickly bringing VMs back online on healthy hosts, HA maintains service availability without requiring manual intervention, making it a critical component for organizations that prioritize uptime and reliability.

In contrast, options related to migration of VMs, snapshot management, or data deduplication address different functionalities within the VMware ecosystem. Migration focuses on moving VMs for load balancing or resource optimization, snapshots deal with capturing VM states for backup and recovery purposes, and data deduplication pertains to storage efficiency rather than VM restarts following failures.