To ensure VMs can be powered on without manual intervention during an outage, which feature must be configured?

To ensure that virtual machines (VMs) can be powered on automatically without manual intervention during an outage, configuring vSphere High Availability (HA) is essential. vSphere HA is designed specifically to provide high availability for VMs in a VMware environment. In the event of a host failure or outage, vSphere HA detects the failure and automatically restarts the affected VMs on another available host within the cluster.

This automatic restart capability minimizes downtime and ensures service continuity, which is critical in environments where uptime is a priority. By leveraging vSphere HA, organizations can ensure their VMs are resilient and can recover quickly from hardware failures without requiring administrator intervention.

Other features such as VMware DRS, vSphere Replication, and vMotion serve different purposes. VMware DRS is focused on load balancing VM workloads across hosts, vSphere Replication is used for replicating VMs for disaster recovery, and vMotion enables live migration of VMs from one host to another without downtime. While these features add value to the overall management and resilience of the VMware environment, they do not specifically address the need for automatic VM restarts during outages, which is the primary function of vSphere HA.