An architect is responsible for extending the hosting design for a customer.

The solution will create a VM-Host Affinity rule that specifies that workloads must run on hosts in a group.

Creating a VM-Host Affinity rule ensures that specific workloads are restricted to certain hosts, which can be useful to avoid placing critical applications on hosts that may not meet their availability requirements.

The solution will enable vSphere High Availability (HA) with restart priority set to "Highest" for the application virtual machines.

Enabling vSphere HA ensures that virtual machines are automatically restarted on other hosts in the event of a host failure. Setting the restart priority to "Highest" for mission-critical VMs ensures that these VMs will have the highest priority for restart if any issues arise.

The solution will enable vSphere Fault Tolerance with vSphere High Availability (HA) virtual machine component failure enabled.

Enabling vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) ensures that the application VMs are fully protected by creating a live shadow VM that runs in lockstep with the primary VM. In the event of a host failure, the shadow VM will take over instantly, providing continuous availability for the application.

The solution will create a virtual machine DRS group that contains all of the critical application workloads.

Creating a virtual machine DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) group for critical workloads ensures that these VMs are placed and migrated to the optimal hosts based on the cluster's resource requirements, improving availability and performance.