An administrator receives an alert of a failed hardware component in a virtualization host running critical services. Which of the following should the administrator perform BEFORE replacing the…

While live migration is ideal, a failed hardware component can destabilize the host to the point where migration operations fail mid-transfer, potentially causing data corruption on both source and destination.

Shutting down all VMs cleanly ensures that guest OS file systems are properly flushed and closed before hardware is removed or replaced, preventing data corruption or storage inconsistency. A failed hardware component may render the host too unstable for live migration, making a clean shutdown the safest guaranteed method to protect VM data integrity before the maintenance operation.

Rebooting VMs does not pause or protect them during a host hardware replacement; the VMs would simply restart into the same at-risk environment on the degraded host.

Suspending VMs saves their memory state to disk but still leaves them associated with the host; if the failed component affects storage or memory subsystems, the suspended state may be unrecoverable or corrupted.