What feature does VMware High Availability (HA) provide?

VMware High Availability (HA) is designed to ensure that virtual machines are continuously available by automatically restarting them on different hosts within a cluster if the original host fails. This feature plays a critical role in minimizing downtime for applications running on virtual machines, as it helps maintain service availability without requiring manual intervention.

When a host experiences a failure, VMware HA detects the outage and automatically migrates the affected virtual machines to another operational host within the cluster, helping to quickly restore services. This capability is essential for businesses that require high uptime and cannot afford prolonged outages.

Other options relate to different functionalities within virtualization environments. Load balancing for virtual machines involves distributing workloads across multiple resources for optimized performance, while backup to external storage pertains to data protection strategies. Optimizing network speed for virtual machines focuses on enhancing the performance of network communications rather than ensuring availability during failures.