Disclosed are various examples for virtual-machine-specific failover protection. In some examples, a power-on request is received for a protected virtual machine. Virtual-machine-specific failover protection is enabled for the protected virtual machine. The protected virtual machine is executed on a first host of a cluster, and a dynamic virtual machine slot for the protected virtual machine is created on a second host of the cluster. The dynamic virtual machine slot is created to match a hardware resource configuration of the protected virtual machine. An anti-affinity rule is maintained between the protected virtual machine and the dynamic virtual machine slot.