What is the primary benefit of using VMware HA within a cluster?

The primary benefit of using VMware High Availability (HA) within a cluster is the automatic restart of virtual machines after a host failure. VMware HA is designed to minimize downtime and enhance the availability of virtual machines by automatically monitoring the health of the host servers within a cluster. When a host fails, VMware HA detects the failure and automatically reboots the affected virtual machines on other hosts in the cluster that still have available resources. This process is crucial for maintaining business continuity, as it ensures that workloads can quickly resume without requiring manual intervention.

The other options, while related to virtualized environments, do not accurately represent the main purpose of VMware HA. For instance, proactive resource allocation during high demand pertains more closely to resource management features rather than high availability. Real-time performance monitoring of applications is an aspect of monitoring solutions rather than high availability functionality. The distribution of workloads across multiple data centers involves different strategies like Site Recovery Manager or Disaster Recovery solutions, which are distinct from the HA capabilities that focus specifically on maintaining uptime within a local cluster.