You need to ensure that a VM is highly available. Which feature should you implement?

Correct answer: Place VMs in an availability set or availability zone

Option C is correct because placing VMs in an availability set distributes them across fault domains and update domains within a datacenter, while availability zones spread them across physically separate datacenters in a region, both protecting against hardware and planned-maintenance outages. Option A is incorrect because a single VM, even with premium storage, is a single point of failure with no redundancy against hardware faults. Option B is incorrect because auto-shutdown is a cost-saving feature that terminates the VM on a schedule, which reduces availability rather than improving it. Option D is incorrect because disk encryption protects data confidentiality at rest but has no effect on the VM's uptime or fault tolerance.