What does the term 'vSphere Fault Tolerance' ensure?

vSphere Fault Tolerance is a feature designed to ensure continuous availability for virtual machines (VMs) during host failures. It achieves this by creating a secondary instance of a VM that runs in lockstep with the primary instance. If the host running the primary VM experiences a failure, the secondary VM on a different host can immediately take over with no interruption in service, ensuring that the applications running on that VM remain available and operational.

The focus of Fault Tolerance is on high availability. It allows organizations to maintain critical applications without downtime, providing resilience against hardware failures. This feature is particularly crucial for businesses that require constant access to services and cannot afford interruptions.

In contrast, while faster VM start-up times, efficient CPU usage, and automatic load balancing of workloads are important considerations in a virtual environment, they are not the primary functions of Fault Tolerance. Therefore, the core benefit of Fault Tolerance is its ability to keep VMs available during unexpected host failures, making it an essential aspect of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.