1. A method for persisting high availability (HA) protection state for virtual machines (VMs) running on host systems of a host cluster, wherein the host cluster aggregates locally-attached storage resources of the host systems to provide an object store, and wherein persistent data for the VMs is stored as per-VM storage objects across the locally-attached storage resources comprising the object store, the method comprising: determining, by a first host system in the host cluster executing a first HA module, an identity of a VM that has been powered-on in the host cluster; and persisting, by the first host system, HA protection state for the VM in a storage object of the VM, the HA protection state indicating that the VM should be restarted on an active host system in case of a failure in the host cluster.