What is VMotion used for in VMware?

VMotion is an essential feature in VMware that allows the live migration of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without any downtime. This capability is crucial for maintaining high availability and minimizing disruptions during maintenance tasks, such as hardware upgrades or load balancing across servers. It ensures that critical applications continue to run smoothly while the underlying hardware is modified or optimized.

The ability to perform live migrations without interrupting service is a significant advantage in data center operations, as it supports dynamic resource allocation and enhances overall system performance. VMotion uses shared storage and involves transferring the VM's memory state and execution status over the network, allowing the VM to resume operations seamlessly on the destination server.

In contrast, the other options pertain to different functions within a virtualized environment. Backing up virtual machine data pertains to preserving data, restoring VMs to previous states relates to recovery processes, and cloning VMs for redundancy involves duplicating VMs for failover or scaling purposes. Each of these functions serves a specific purpose, but they do not describe the primary capability and purpose of VMotion.