What does VMware HA do?

VMware High Availability (HA) is designed to provide high availability for virtual machines within a vSphere environment. Its primary function is to continuously monitor the health of the virtual machines and the underlying physical hosts. In the event of a failure, such as when a physical host goes offline due to hardware issues or power failure, VMware HA automatically restarts the affected virtual machines on other hosts within the cluster that are running and available.

This capability minimizes downtime for applications that depend on those virtual machines, ensuring that services remain accessible with minimal interruption. It creates a resilient environment by actively monitoring virtual machines and responding swiftly to failures.

The other choices refer to functionalities outside the focus of VMware HA. For instance, automatically deploying new virtual machines relates more to provisioning tools or templates rather than high availability. Improving network performance is typically handled by different optimization techniques and features in networking rather than HA. Managing storage resources pertains to storage management solutions, which is separate from the high availability focus of VMware HA. Thus, the primary role of VMware HA is to ensure that virtual machines remain running by restarting them on available hosts after a failure, making the chosen answer the correct one.