High Availability with Load Balancers
A customer-facing website must stay available if one of two application servers fails. Which design should the team implement?
Quick Answer
The correct design is a load balancer in front of multiple application servers. This configuration achieves high availability by distributing incoming traffic across the server pool; if one server fails, the load balancer automatically redirects requests to the remaining healthy servers, ensuring the website remains accessible without interruption. On the Security+ SY0-701 exam, this scenario tests your understanding of fault tolerance and redundancy as core availability principles—a common trap is assuming a single server with failover clustering is sufficient, but load balancers provide active-active distribution rather than passive standby. Remember the mnemonic “LAMP” for high availability: Load balancer, Application servers, Multiple nodes, Persistent uptime.
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high availability with other security or operational measures, such as backups or password policies, failing to recognize that only redundant infrastructure with automatic failover can maintain uptime during a server failure.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple application servers, providing high availability and fault tolerance. If one server fails, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the remaining healthy server(s), ensuring the website remains accessible. This design directly addresses the requirement for continued availability despite a single server failure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
A single server with a larger power supply
Why it's wrong here
A bigger power supply does not provide another server to take over if the system fails.
- ✓
A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
Why this is correct
A load balancer can send traffic to a healthy server if one instance becomes unavailable.
- ✗
A daily screenshot of the website
Why it's wrong here
Screenshots are not a resilience control and cannot keep the service online during failure.
- ✗
A more restrictive password policy
Why it's wrong here
Password rules help access security, but they do not add availability or failover capability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Secure Network Design Principles
Key term
Load balancer
A load balancer is a device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers so no single server gets overwhelmed.
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on SY0-701
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A customer portal runs on a single application server behind a database cluster. Leadership wants the portal to keep working if that application server fails, but the budget is tight and the team wants the simplest design that can automatically fail over. What should they add?
medium- ✓ A.A second application server configured as an active-passive failover pair with health checks.
- B.A cold backup server that is started manually after the outage is detected.
- C.A multi-region active-active deployment with global traffic steering.
- D.Additional RAID storage in the application server to prevent service interruption.
Why A: An active-passive failover pair with health checks provides automatic failover at the lowest complexity and cost. The passive server remains on standby, and health checks (e.g., ICMP, TCP port checks, or HTTP GET requests) detect application server failure, triggering automatic IP or service takeover. This meets the requirement for automatic failover without the expense and complexity of active-active or multi-region designs.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SY0-701 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SY0-701 exam.