A business-critical application runs in a region that does not support availability zones. It uses two Azure VMs and must survive planned maintenance and a single host failure, but it does not need automatic scale-out. Which two actions should the administrator take? Select two.

Convert the workload to a single larger VM

A single VM removes redundancy and does not protect against host failures or maintenance.

Deploy the VMs in separate availability zones

Zones may not exist in the region, and the scenario explicitly rules out zone-based design.

Put the VMs in a proximity placement group

This improves co-location and performance, but it does not provide the required resilience.

What does this AZ-104 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Place both VMs in the same availability set — When zones are unavailable, an availability set is the right resiliency feature for a pair of VMs that need protection from planned maintenance and a single host failure. Putting both VMs in the same availability set lets Azure place them into different fault domains and update domains automatically. That arrangement reduces the chance that one host issue or maintenance operation takes down both instances at once, which matches the business requirement without adding unnecessary scale-out complexity. Why others are wrong: Separate availability zones are not an option because the region does not support them. A single larger VM eliminates redundancy, which makes the design less resilient, not more. A proximity placement group is intended for low-latency placement, not failure-domain separation. The incorrect choices either violate the regional constraint or solve a different performance problem than the one described.

What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.