A new vulnerability has been announced which affects several critical VM guests, but no patch is available. Which of the following can the administrator perform to mitigate this risk prior to a…

Updating antivirus on workstations targets endpoint malware on desktops and does not address vulnerabilities specific to VM guest or hypervisor components.

Applying all available patches to both VM guests and VM hosts closes any other known vulnerabilities that an attacker could chain with the announced vulnerability to achieve exploitation. Keeping the hypervisor host fully patched is especially important because a compromise at the host layer can affect all guest VMs, and reducing known weaknesses at every layer limits the attacker's available options while waiting for the specific patch.

Disabling the affected service is only viable if the service is non-essential; because the question specifies the VMs are critical, this option risks disrupting required business functions and is not universally applicable.

Clustering affected VM guests and adding resource pooling improves availability and load balancing but has no effect on remediating or containing a security vulnerability.