220-1101 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Practice Question
A company operates a private cloud environment with a cluster of physical hosts running virtual machines. The IT administrator wants to ensure that if a physical host fails unexpectedly, the virtual machines running on that host will be automatically restarted on another healthy host in the cluster without manual intervention. Which feature should the administrator configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse High Availability (which restarts VMs after failure) with Fault Tolerance (which keeps VMs running through failure), leading them to select FT when the question explicitly asks for automatic restart after failure.
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 is designed to automatically restart virtual machines on another healthy host within a cluster when a physical host fails. HA uses heartbeat monitoring between hosts and the vCenter Server (or equivalent management platform) to detect failures, then triggers VM restarts on surviving hosts without manual intervention. This directly matches the requirement for automatic recovery from an unexpected host failure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
High availability (HA)
Why this is correct
HA (High Availability) operates by maintaining a heartbeat between hosts in a cluster; when a host ceases to respond, the cluster recognizes the failure and automatically restarts the affected VMs on healthy remaining hosts. This restart process is immediate and does not require an administrator to trigger it, satisfying the requirement of automatic restart without manual intervention. However, HA does not preserve the in-memory state of the VMs; it recovers from the last written disk state, so there is some downtime and potential data loss.
- ✗
Fault tolerance (FT)
Why it's wrong here
Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability by running a shadow, secondary VM that executes in lockstep with the primary VM on a different host, so that if the primary host fails, the secondary takes over with zero downtime. This requires specialized hardware, a dedicated network, and substantial extra CPU/memory resources to keep the shadow VM synchronized, making it suitable only for mission-critical, zero-downtime workloads. Unlike HA, which simply restarts VMs after a failure, FT maintains an active duplicate and does not involve a restart—it is a much heavier and more complex solution than the scenario demands.
- ✗
Load balancing
Why it's wrong here
Load balancing distributes VM workloads across hosts based on current resource usage, such as CPU or memory, to optimize performance and avoid overcommitting a single host. It constantly monitors resource utilization and migrates or places VMs accordingly, but it is not designed to detect host failures or to restart VMs after a crash. In fact, load balancing typically works in conjunction with HA, but by itself it cannot provide the automatic restart capability that the company requires.
- ✗
Live migration
Why it's wrong here
Live migration (often implemented as vMotion in VMware) moves a running VM from one host to another without any downtime, transferring the entire in-memory state and then switching over the network. Migration is a manual or scheduled action, triggered by an administrator or a maintenance plan, not an automatic response to a host failure. It cannot detect a failed host because the source host is typically gone, and it cannot restart a VM that was running on that failed host—that is the role of HA.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This 220-1101 question is part of Courseiva's 896-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1101 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1101 exam.