What feature provides fault tolerance for virtual machines?

The feature that provides fault tolerance for virtual machines is vSphere HA (High Availability). This mechanism automatically detects when a virtual machine fails and ensures that another instance of that virtual machine is started on a different host within the cluster. It minimizes downtime by quickly restarting VMs that have encountered failures, thus ensuring continuous availability of applications running on those virtual machines.

While VM Snapshots allow users to save the state of a VM at a specific point in time, enabling recovery to a prior state, they do not provide real-time fault tolerance. Resource Pooling helps in distributing resources among multiple virtual machines but does not address failures. Similarly, VMotion enables the live migration of VMs between hosts without downtime, but it does not inherently protect against host failures. Therefore, vSphere HA is the designated feature specifically designed to provide fault tolerance by restarting VMs automatically on healthy hosts after a failure occurs.