I'd like to understand if there is a way to automatically fail over to another VM on another machine in case of an *unexpected* machine crash or power outage. It needs to include the state of the machine. Choices I've found:
Does anyone know if unexpected migrations can be supported; and if so, any pointers to (clear) documentation?
Thanks.
Fault Tolerance may be what you want.
Thanks daphnissov. To tie this off, the document that covers this is called vSphere Availability. It describes solutions for both "slow" stateless recovery via restarts, and two solutions for automatic stateful failover (vSphere Fault Tolerance and vCenter HA).
Just so its clear vcenter ha is only for the vcenter vm, it won't work for others.
Yes, so what you want is Fault Tolerance not, as sjesse pointed out, vCenter HA.