In a mission critical environment, performing maintenance operations on a host FIRST requires which of the following?

Shutting down the host without addressing running VMs first would forcibly terminate all workloads, causing unplanned downtime and potential data corruption.

Migrating VMs off the host requires the VMs to already be in a stable, controlled state and depends on available destination hosts, making it a subsequent step rather than the first required action.

Shutting down VMs terminates them completely, losing any unsaved in-memory state and creating unnecessary downtime, which is unacceptable in mission-critical environments.

Pausing (suspending) VMs freezes their execution state to disk or memory, allowing the host to undergo maintenance without permanently terminating workloads. This approach preserves the VM state so operations can resume after maintenance completes, which is essential in mission-critical scenarios where service continuity and data integrity are required.