What is the primary benefit of using vSphere High Availability (HA)?

The primary benefit of using vSphere High Availability (HA) is the automatic restart of virtual machines (VMs) after a host failure. When a physical host in a vSphere cluster goes down, vSphere HA detects the failure and automatically restarts the affected VMs on other available hosts in the cluster without requiring user intervention. This capability ensures minimal downtime and improves the availability of applications running on those VMs.

The focus of vSphere HA is on maintaining uptime and providing resilience against host failures, which is crucial for enterprise environments where consistent application availability is a priority. By automatically recovering VMs, organizations can reduce the impact of outages and ensure that critical workloads remain operational.

While improved workload performance, resource load balancing, and enhanced storage throughput are important considerations in a virtualized environment, they are not the primary functions of vSphere HA. Instead, those aspects are generally managed by other components of the VMware stack, such as Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for load balancing.