AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Test 14 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A web tier must use identical VMs, keep the desired instance count if one instance becomes unhealthy, and allow future horizontal expansion without creating VMs one by one. What should the administrator deploy?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

A virtual machine scale set with health-based instance management.. A virtual machine scale set with health-based instance management is correct because it automatically maintains a desired number of identical VM instances, replaces unhealthy instances based on health probes, and supports horizontal scaling without manual VM creation. This aligns with the requirements for identical VMs, automatic instance replacement, and future expansion.

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An availability set because it automatically replaces unhealthy instances.

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An Azure Dedicated Host to keep the VMs on one physical server.

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A proximity placement group to ensure the VMs are distributed evenly.

Question 2

Based on the exhibit, the business wants two Azure VMs to stay available if a host is patched or fails. A full datacenter outage is not part of the requirement. What should you use?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the VMs in an availability set.. An availability set protects against failures within a single datacenter by distributing VMs across multiple fault domains (physical racks with separate power and network) and update domains (groups that are patched sequentially). This ensures that during host patching or a host failure, at least one VM remains available, meeting the requirement without needing to survive a full datacenter outage.

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Deploy the VMs in the same availability zone.

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Use a virtual machine scale set with autoscale only.

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Place both VMs on a dedicated host.

Question 3

An Azure VM backup job starts failing immediately after protection is enabled. The error states that the VM agent is not ready. The VM was created from a custom image and no extensions have ever installed successfully. What should the administrator verify first?

Accepted Answer

That the Azure VM Agent service is installed and running inside the guest OS.. The error 'VM agent not ready' indicates that the Azure Backup extension cannot communicate with the VM agent inside the guest OS. Since the VM was created from a custom image and no extensions have ever installed successfully, the most likely cause is that the Azure VM Agent service is not installed or not running. The agent is required for backup extensions to function, so verifying its status inside the guest OS is the first troubleshooting step.

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That the Recovery Services vault is in the same resource group as the VM.

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That soft delete is enabled on the vault.

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That the subscription has enough free Azure Backup storage capacity.

Question 4

A Windows Azure VM must download configuration data from Azure Key Vault during first boot. Security policy forbids storing passwords, certificates, or client secrets on the VM. What should the administrator configure?

Accepted Answer

Enable a system-assigned managed identity on the VM and grant it Key Vault access.. A system-assigned managed identity provides an automatically managed service principal in Entra ID, tied to the VM's lifecycle. Granting this identity the appropriate Key Vault access policy (e.g., Get, List secrets) allows the VM to authenticate to Key Vault without any stored credentials, satisfying the security policy. The VM can then retrieve configuration data during first boot using the Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoint.

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Create a service principal and place its secret in the VM's startup script.

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Attach a custom script extension that embeds the Key Vault password in plain text.

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Use an Entra ID user account and sign in interactively after deployment.

Question 5

A development VM is rebuilt often and does not need its operating system disk contents to survive deallocation. The team wants the lowest practical disk latency for the OS. Which disk option should the administrator choose?

Accepted Answer

Ephemeral OS disk. Ephemeral OS disks use the local VM storage (SSD) rather than Azure managed disks, providing the lowest latency for OS read/write operations. Since the VM is rebuilt often and disk persistence is not required, the ephemeral disk is ideal because its contents are lost when the VM is deallocated, eliminating the need for a separate managed disk.

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Standard HDD managed disk

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Geo-redundant storage for the OS disk

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A data disk formatted as the boot disk

Question 6

Two backend VMs must remain available if an Azure host is patched or fails. A full datacenter outage is not part of the requirement, and the team wants the VMs to stay in the same region with predictable east-west latency. Which placement option should the administrator choose?

Accepted Answer

An availability set. An availability set distributes VMs across multiple fault domains (separate physical racks with independent power, cooling, and network) within a single Azure datacenter. This protects against host patching and hardware failures while keeping VMs in the same datacenter, ensuring predictable east-west latency. The requirement explicitly excludes a full datacenter outage, so availability zones (which span separate datacenters) are unnecessary.

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Availability zones in separate datacenters

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A proximity placement group

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A single VM scale set instance

Question 7

Which three of the following are valid ways to achieve high availability for a virtual machine workload running in Azure? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Configure a VM Scale Set with a minimum instance count of 2 and spread across fault domains.. Deploying a VM inside an Availability Set with two or more VMs ensures high availability by placing the VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains within a single Azure datacenter. This protects against hardware failures and planned maintenance events, as at least one VM remains available during an outage or update cycle.

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Set the VM’s operating system disk to a Premium SSD tier to reduce disk latency.

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Enable Azure Backup on the VM to protect against regional disasters.

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Assign a public IP address to each VM to enable load balancing.

Question 8

You are designing a containerized application deployment in Azure. Which three options must you consider when choosing between Azure Container Instances (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

AKS provides built-in auto-scaling, service discovery, and rolling update capabilities.. ACI is correct because it is designed for simple, short-lived tasks or burst workloads that do not require orchestration, making it ideal for scenarios like batch processing or event-driven applications. AKS is correct because it provides built-in auto-scaling, service discovery, and rolling update capabilities, which are essential for managing complex microservices architectures. ACI is correct because it supports mounting an Azure Files share as a persistent volume, enabling stateful workloads to share data across container instances.

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ACI automatically manages container orchestration, including load balancing and scaling across nodes.

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AKS requires you to manage the underlying virtual machine infrastructure, including patching the OS.

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AKS supports only Linux-based container images and cannot run Windows containers.

Question 9

Which three of the following statements about Azure App Service plans are correct? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Apps in the same App Service plan share the same compute resources, even if they are in different resource groups.. Apps in the same App Service plan share the same compute resources (VMs, memory, CPU) because the plan defines the underlying infrastructure. This is true even if the apps are in different resource groups, as the plan is the boundary for resource allocation, not the resource group.

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Changing the pricing tier of an App Service plan always causes downtime for all apps in the plan.

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An App Service plan can only contain apps from the same region and the same resource group.

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The Free and Shared tiers support custom domain names and SSL binding without additional cost.

Question 10

Order the steps to configure Azure DNS for a custom domain.

Accepted Answer

Step 1: Create DNS zone. Step 2: Retrieve name servers. Step 3: Update registrar. Step 4: Add DNS records. Step 5: Verify.. The correct sequence for configuring Azure DNS for a custom domain is: create the DNS zone, retrieve the Azure-assigned name servers, update your domain registrar to use those name servers, add the required DNS records (e.g., A, CNAME) to the zone, and finally verify domain resolution. This order ensures that delegation is properly set before records are queried, and avoids common pitfalls such as updating the registrar without the correct name servers or trying to retrieve name servers before the zone exists.

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Step 1: Create DNS zone. Step 2: Update registrar. Step 3: Retrieve name servers. Step 4: Add DNS records. Step 5: Verify.

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Step 1: Create DNS zone. Step 2: Add DNS records. Step 3: Retrieve name servers. Step 4: Update registrar. Step 5: Verify.

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Step 1: Retrieve name servers. Step 2: Create DNS zone. Step 3: Update registrar. Step 4: Add DNS records. Step 5: Verify.

Question 11

You manage a line-of-business application running on an Azure virtual machine. The VM currently uses a 512-GiB Premium SSD data disk that stores a large indexed database. The database engine requires consistent low-latency access and the disk must remain online while it is resized. You need to increase the disk to 2 TiB with the least administrative effort. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Expand the managed disk to 2 TiB in the Azure portal and then extend the volume inside the guest operating system.. Azure managed disks support online expansion, so you can increase the data disk from 512 GiB to 2 TiB while the VM remains running. After the Azure-side resize, you must extend the partition and file system inside the guest OS so the database can use the new space. This avoids the downtime and data migration that detaching, recreating, or attaching another disk would require.

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Convert the VM's OS disk to a managed disk and then increase the size of the data disk.

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Detach the data disk, recreate it as a 2-TiB Premium SSD, and reattach it to the VM.

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Create a new 2-TiB Ultra Disk, attach it, and migrate the database by using Storage Migration Service.

Question 12

A company runs a stateless web tier on a scale set of Azure virtual machines. The operations team wants the scale set to add instances automatically when average CPU utilization exceeds 70 percent for 10 minutes, and to remove instances when it drops below 30 percent. They also need to ensure that instances are not removed during a 15-minute deployment window. Which Azure feature should you configure?

Accepted Answer

Virtual machine scale set autoscale rules combined with scale set instance protection.. Virtual machine scale set autoscale rules evaluate metrics like CPU over a defined time window and adjust instance count up or down. Instance protection policies can be applied to specific instances so the scale set does not remove them during operations such as deployments. Configuring both features together provides automatic metric-based scaling and the temporary protection the operations team requires.

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Azure Monitor alerts that trigger an Azure Function to resize the scale set.

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Azure Automation runbooks that start and stop VMs based on a schedule.

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Azure Load Balancer health probes that restart unhealthy instances automatically.

Question 13

An administrator needs to deploy a Windows Server 2022 Azure VM that will run a latency-sensitive trading application. The application requires extremely low network latency and high throughput between the VM and other VMs in the same backend tier. The VMs are not part of an availability set. Which networking feature should be enabled on the VM's network interface to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Accelerated networking. Accelerated networking is designed to provide low-latency, high-throughput networking by using SR-IOV to bypass the software virtual switch. It is available for many VM sizes and can be enabled on a NIC regardless of availability set membership. The other options either add latency, do not address per-VM network performance, or require specific end-to-end configuration not mentioned.

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Jumbo frames (MTU 9000)

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Azure Firewall with premium tier

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Azure Load Balancer with HA ports

Question 14

A company runs a stateless web application on a set of Azure VMs behind an Azure Load Balancer. The operations team needs to ensure that the VMs can be automatically added to or removed from the load balancer's backend pool based on the health of the application, and that the VMs are automatically repaired if they become unhealthy. The team wants to minimize manual intervention. Which two features should the team implement? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a Virtual Machine Scale Set with automatic instance repair enabled.. To automatically add or remove VMs from a load balancer based on application health, a health probe is essential. To automatically repair unhealthy VMs, a Virtual Machine Scale Set with automatic instance repair is required. Together, these features provide the desired automation and resiliency, minimizing manual intervention.

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Enable Azure Disk Encryption on the VM OS disks.

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Configure a network security group to allow only HTTP traffic.

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Deploy the VMs into an availability set.

Question 15

A company has an Azure VM running a production workload. The VM's OS disk is currently a Standard HDD. The administrator needs to improve the disk performance for the OS disk without recreating the VM. What should the administrator do?

Accepted Answer

Change the OS disk to a Premium SSD by using the Azure portal or Azure CLI.. Managed disks support changing the performance tier without recreating the VM. Upgrading the OS disk from Standard HDD to Premium SSD increases IOPS and throughput, directly improving performance. The other options either do not affect the OS disk performance or are not supported.

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Add a new data disk and move the OS to it.

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Resize the VM to a larger size that includes a temporary disk.

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Enable read-only caching on the OS disk.