What is VMotion used for in VMware?

VMotion is a key feature in VMware that allows for the live migration of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without incurring downtime. This capability is crucial in maintaining high availability and performance in virtualized environments, as it enables administrators to redistribute workloads, perform hardware maintenance, or avoid potential resource contention without impacting the end users or applications running on those VMs.

By leveraging VMotion, organizations can enhance resource utilization and efficiency, ensuring that workloads are balanced across hosts. This not only allows for optimal performance but also helps in disaster recovery scenarios by allowing quick repositioning of VMs in response to hardware failures or other issues.

The other options, while related to virtualization, do not accurately define the primary purpose of VMotion. For instance, VMotion is not designed for backing up data, restoring previous states, or cloning VMs, which are functionalities associated with different features within VMware's suite, such as snapshot management or cloning tools.