What vSphere component provides continuous availability for mission-critical virtual machines?

The choice of vSphere Fault Tolerance as the correct answer highlights its unique capability to provide continuous availability for mission-critical virtual machines. Fault Tolerance allows a virtual machine to run simultaneously on two different hosts, ensuring that if one host fails, the other can take over immediately without any disruption to the virtual machine's operations. This means that there is no downtime, and applications running on these VMs remain accessible, which is essential for critical workloads.

This technology specifically protects against hardware failures by creating a secondary instance of the virtual machine that mirrors the primary instance in real-time. If a failure occurs on the host running the primary VM, the secondary VM continues operating seamlessly. This capability is invaluable for organizations that require high availability and have strict SLAs regarding uptime.

While other options like vSphere HA and vSphere Replication contribute to availability and data protection, they do so in different ways and with varying degrees of impact on uptime. vSphere HA provides automated recovery in the event of host failure, but it might involve a brief downtime during the restart process. vSphere vMotion enables live migration of virtual machines, allowing for workload balancing without downtime, but it does not inherently provide fault tolerance against host failures. vSphere Replication, on the other hand,