Which feature allows for the automated balancing of workloads across hosts?

The Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is designed specifically to automate the process of balancing workloads across hosts in a cluster. It intelligently monitors resource usage and automatically makes adjustments as needed to ensure optimal performance for virtual machines. When a host becomes overloaded, DRS can migrate virtual machines from that host to others with available resources, thereby maintaining balance and improving overall resource utilization.

This automation reduces the need for manual intervention and allows environments to adapt quickly to changing workloads, ensuring that applications run smoothly and efficiently. DRS can also be configured with rules and policies to ensure that specific virtual machines are placed on the appropriate hosts, further enhancing resource management in a virtualized infrastructure.

Other features, such as VMware Tools and Storage vMotion, serve different purposes. VMware Tools enhances the performance of virtual machines but does not directly manage workload distribution among hosts. Storage vMotion is concerned with moving virtual disk files between datastores without downtime but does not involve host balancing. Resource Allocation Manager typically refers to manual or predefined methods rather than the automated, intelligent management that DRS provides.