Which feature can improve VM availability during planned maintenance?

vMotion is a powerful feature in VMware vSphere that enhances the availability of virtual machines (VMs), particularly during planned maintenance activities. This feature allows for the live migration of running VMs from one physical host to another without any downtime. This capability is especially useful when administrators need to perform upgrades, apply patches, or conduct maintenance on the physical host where a VM is currently running.

During the vMotion process, the memory and CPU states of the VM are transferred to the destination host while its operations continue seamlessly. This means users experience no interruption, and the applications running on the VM remain accessible. By leveraging vMotion, you can maintain continuity of service and enhance overall VM availability, ensuring that maintenance tasks can be conducted with minimal impact on production workloads.

In contrast, vSphere Replication focuses on maintaining copies of VMs for disaster recovery purposes, which does not directly improve availability during planned maintenance. VM Snapshots are useful for capturing the state of a VM at a specific point in time but do not facilitate live migration, and can even introduce complexity if overused. Resource Pools are designed for managing and allocating resources among VMs but do not have a direct impact on VM availability during planned maintenance activities. Thus, vMotion stands out as the solution