What is the purpose of vSphere High Availability (HA)?

The primary purpose of vSphere High Availability (HA) is to enable uninterrupted access to virtual machines in the event of hardware failures. When a host fails, vSphere HA automatically detects the failure and restarts the affected virtual machines on other available hosts in the cluster. This functionality is essential in maintaining service availability, as it minimizes downtime and ensures that critical workloads remain operational, even in the face of hardware issues.

While other options mention important features of VMware’s suite of solutions, they do not accurately describe the fundamental role of vSphere HA. Load balancing techniques are typically associated with Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), which seeks to optimize resource usage by distributing workloads across hosts. Live migration, which allows the movement of virtual machines without downtime, is handled by VMware vMotion. Lastly, data protection through replication is more aligned with products such as VMware Site Recovery Manager or vSphere Replication, which focus on disaster recovery rather than immediate failover capabilities.