What happens when a host configured with vSphere HA goes down?

When a host configured with vSphere High Availability (HA) goes down, the expected behavior is that the virtual machines running on that host will be restarted on different hosts within the same cluster. This is a fundamental feature of vSphere HA, which is designed to minimize downtime in case of host failures.

vSphere HA continuously monitors the health of hosts within a cluster. If a host becomes unresponsive, vSphere HA automatically detects this failure and initiates the restart of the powered-on virtual machines that resided on the failed host. This process helps ensure that critical applications and services resume as quickly as possible without manual intervention, providing high availability of workloads.

In this way, vSphere HA contributes to robust disaster recovery and resilience strategies, allowing for better management of virtualized environments. This operational continuity is significantly beneficial in production environments where uptime is crucial, making the correct answer a reflection of vSphere HA's primary purpose.