220-1101 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Practice Question
A company operates a private cloud using a hypervisor cluster. The administrator wants to ensure that if a physical host server fails, the virtual machines running on that host are automatically restarted on other healthy hosts in the cluster with minimal manual intervention. Which hypervisor feature should the administrator configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse High Availability (automatic restart after failure) with Live Migration (manual, zero-downtime movement), leading candidates to choose Live Migration because it sounds like a seamless failover solution.
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 (HA)
High Availability (HA) is the correct feature because it automatically detects a physical host failure and restarts the affected virtual machines on other healthy hosts in the cluster without requiring manual intervention. This is achieved through heartbeat monitoring between hosts and a cluster resource management system that ensures VM availability after a host crash.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Live Migration
Why it's wrong here
Live Migration is a manual, planned operation that transfers a running VM from one host to another with no perceived downtime, using techniques like memory pre-copy and a network handover. It is triggered by an administrator for maintenance or by load-balancing policies, not by a host's unexpected failure. Because it requires operator or policy intervention to initiate, it cannot serve as the automatic recovery mechanism described in the scenario.
- ✗
Fault Tolerance
Why it's wrong here
Fault Tolerance provides zero-downtime protection by continuously mirroring a primary VM's execution to a secondary VM on another host, using vLockstep or similar to keep memory and CPU state identical. If the primary fails, the secondary takes over seamlessly, but this does not restart the failed VM; rather, it maintains a shadow copy, and it requires double the resources for each protected VM. Because HA's goal is to restart VMs on surviving hosts after a failure, FT's lockstep mirroring is a different resilience mechanism, not the one described.
- ✓
High Availability (HA)
Why this is correct
High Availability (HA) monitors cluster nodes via heartbeats over a management network; when a host becomes unreachable, HA agents on the surviving hosts coordinate to restart the affected VMs from shared storage on healthy hosts. This automated recovery is the standard for protecting against unplanned host failures, with configurable restart priorities and isolation responses for split-brain scenarios. It minimizes downtime but does not eliminate it, as VMs must go through a reboot cycle.
- ✗
Resource Pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource Pooling aggregates the physical CPU, memory, and storage of multiple hosts into logical pools, letting VMs be sized independently of any single server and allowing administrators to set shares, limits, and reservations. It purely concerns where and how compute resources are available, not whether a VM continues to run when its host dies. Without any health monitoring or restart logic, resource pooling has no role in automatic failover, which is why it does not match the required behavior.
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