220-1101 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Practice Question
A company runs a private cloud with multiple virtualization hosts. To meet an SLA requirement, the IT administrator needs to ensure that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines running on that host are automatically restarted on another healthy host with minimal manual intervention. Which virtualization feature should the administrator implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse high availability with live migration, thinking that live migration can automatically handle host failures, but live migration requires the source host to be running and accessible, whereas HA is designed specifically for unplanned host outages.
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 automatically detects a physical host failure and restarts the affected virtual machines on another healthy host within the cluster, meeting the SLA requirement for minimal manual intervention. HA relies on a heartbeat mechanism between hosts and a management platform (e.g., vSphere HA) to trigger the restart process without requiring user action.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Load balancing
Why it's wrong here
Load balancing works by distributing virtual machines or resource demands across hosts to optimize utilization and avoid hotspots, but it is a continuous optimization process that rebalances workloads based on current conditions. It does not include failure detection or automatic restart logic for VMs when a host goes down; a failed host simply drops its VMs, and load balancing lacks the health monitoring and failover orchestration to bring them back up without human intervention. Therefore, while load balancing improves performance and capacity usage, it does not satisfy an SLA that requires automatic recovery from host failures.
- ✓
High availability
Why this is correct
High availability is the correct solution because it continuously monitors host health via heartbeat signals and, upon detecting a host failure, automatically restarts the affected virtual machines on available healthy hosts within the cluster. This failover process is designed to operate without manual intervention, directly meeting the SLA's requirement to minimize downtime and operational overhead. Unlike load balancing or live migration, high-availability clustering includes the necessary health-monitoring and orchestration state to detect abrupt host loss and restart VMs in a coordinated manner, even if the original host remains unreachable.
- ✗
Live migration
Why it's wrong here
Live migration, such as vMotion, is the process of moving a running VM from one host to another with no downtime, typically initiated by an administrator or scheduled maintenance plan. It relies on transferring the VM's memory state over the network while preserving active connections, which is ideal for planned moves but does not react to unexpected host outages. Live migration cannot detect a failed host or restart VMs from it because the migration is not invoked automatically and the source host is unavailable; it is a manual or scheduled operation, so it fails to meet the SLA's requirement for automatic response to host failure.
- ✗
Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling aggregates compute, storage, and network resources across hosts but provides no automatic restart logic for VMs after a host failure; it lacks the health-monitoring and failover orchestration required to meet the SLA. This option is tempting because pooling is often confused with high-availability clustering, and in a scenario where load-balancing or dynamic resource allocation across hosts is the goal, resource pooling would be the correct choice.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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