What is the role of VMware High Availability (HA)?

VMware High Availability (HA) plays a critical role in ensuring uninterrupted availability of virtual machines (VMs) by automatically managing their restart in the event of hardware failure. When a host in a cluster fails, VMware HA detects the failure and automatically restarts the affected VMs on other hosts that are still operational within the cluster. This functionality minimizes downtime and helps maintain business continuity, making it a vital feature for disaster recovery and high availability setups in virtualized environments.

The other options, while related to aspects of virtualization infrastructure, do not accurately describe the specific function of VMware HA. Preventing network intrusions pertains to security measures rather than availability. Managing updates and installing patches are part of system maintenance and do not relate directly to the resilience and uptime of VMs. In contrast, the automatic VM restarts provided by HA are crucial for ensuring that services remain available despite underlying hardware issues.