Which feature provides a virtual machine with high availability and minimal downtime?

The feature that provides a virtual machine with high availability and minimal downtime is vSphere Fault Tolerance. This technology creates a live shadow instance of a virtual machine, ensuring that there is an exact copy running concurrently with the primary VM. In the event of hardware failure or a problem with the primary VM, the shadow VM can take over instantly without any noticeable downtime for the applications and users relying on it.

Fault Tolerance is particularly valuable in environments where constant uptime is critical, as it allows organizations to maintain service without interruption. This contrasts with other features like snapshots, which are more about capturing the state of a VM at a specific point in time, or resource pools and the Distributed Resource Scheduler, which focus on optimizing and managing resource allocation and load balancing rather than preventing downtime.