What is the primary function of vSphere High Availability (HA)?

The primary function of vSphere High Availability (HA) is the automatic restart of virtual machines on failure. This functionality is crucial for ensuring the uptime and availability of applications running on virtual machines within a vSphere environment. In the event of a host failure, vSphere HA automatically detects the failure and can restart affected virtual machines on other available hosts within the cluster. This process minimizes downtime and helps maintain service continuity without requiring manual intervention.

While load balancing of virtual machines, resource management across hosts, and monitoring of network traffic are important functions in a virtualized environment, they are not the central purpose of vSphere HA. HA specifically focuses on maintaining the availability of services by quickly responding to hardware or software failures through automated recovery processes. This makes it an essential component of disaster recovery and business continuity planning in virtualized datacenters.