What feature must be enabled to configure vSphere Proactive HA?

To configure vSphere Proactive HA, it is essential to have vSphere DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) enabled. Proactive HA relies on DRS to manage VM placement and to respond to hardware health threats. When Proactive HA detects an issue with a host, it collaborates with DRS to automatically evacuate virtual machines from the affected host to maintain availability and performance.

This integration with vSphere DRS allows for intelligent load balancing across the remaining healthy hosts in the cluster. By ensuring that DRS is operational, Proactive HA can effectively move workloads away from potentially failing hosts before they impact the operation of virtual machines.

While other features like vSphere HA, Cluster EVC, and Fault Tolerance are valuable in their own right, they don't directly relate to the configuration of vSphere Proactive HA. vSphere HA provides basic high availability features, but it does not actively manage load balancing and workload distribution as DRS does. Cluster EVC ensures consistent CPU features across hosts for VM compatibility, and Fault Tolerance is a separate feature designed to provide continuous availability without downtime for individual virtual machines, but none of these directly enable Proactive HA functionality.