hardMultiple Choice
220-1202 Practice Question: A company uses a private cloud for its internal…
A company uses a private cloud for its internal applications. The IT team wants to ensure that if one physical host fails, the virtual machines running on it can be automatically restarted on another host with minimal downtime. Which feature should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
CompTIA A+ candidates often confuse High Availability (automatic restart after failure) with Fault Tolerance (continuous uptime with a secondary VM), leading them to mistakenly choose FT when the question asks for automatic restart with minimal downtime rather than zero downtime.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
High availability
High availability (HA) is the correct feature because it is designed to automatically restart virtual machines on a surviving host within a cluster when a physical host fails. HA uses heartbeat monitoring between hosts and a resource manager to detect failures and trigger VM restarts, minimizing downtime without requiring manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Fault tolerance
Why it's wrong here
Fault tolerance keeps a duplicate VM synchronised on a second host, maintaining state with zero interruption, but it consumes double resources and does not restart VMs after a host failure. It suits continuous availability for a single critical workload, whereas the scenario requires automatic restart of many VMs elsewhere.
- ✓
High availability
Why this is correct
High availability continuously monitors host health and automatically restarts affected virtual machines on surviving hosts within the cluster, satisfying the requirement for automatic recovery with minimal downtime when a physical host fails. Unlike fault tolerance, which maintains a live mirrored instance, high availability accepts brief restart interruption.
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Live migration
Why it's wrong here
Live migration moves a running VM between hosts while both remain healthy, typically for maintenance or load balancing. It cannot evacuate VMs from a host that has already failed, so no automatic restart occurs. It would be correct for planned, zero-downtime relocation, not unplanned host failure.
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Snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots capture a VM's disk state at a point in time for rollback or backup purposes. They do not monitor host health or restart VMs on surviving hosts, so a failed physical host leaves its VMs offline. Snapshots would be correct for reverting configuration changes or recovering data, not host-failure resilience.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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