Which feature is a prerequisite for Proactive High Availability (HA)?

Proactive High Availability (HA) in VMware vSphere is a feature designed to enhance the standard HA capabilities by predicting and preemptively addressing issues that might cause downtime. The prerequisite for Proactive HA is that the environment must utilize vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

The reason DRS is critical for Proactive HA is that it continuously monitors the virtual machine workloads and their resource needs, making intelligent decisions to load-balance resources across the cluster. This dynamic resource management facilitates the proactive identification of potential issues before they escalate into operational problems.

When DRS is enabled, it can analyze data such as CPU and memory usage to forecast potential resource shortages. For example, if a host is becoming overloaded, DRS can redistribute workloads away from that host to maintain performance and stability across the cluster. This capability is essential for Proactive HA because it enables the system to address resource issues before they lead to failures, thereby allowing for the implementation of corrective actions in a timely manner.

This foundational relationship reinforces the importance of DRS in maintaining a robust and highly available virtualized environment, making it the correct prerequisite for Proactive HA.