A business wants a line-of-business VM workload to keep running if one Azure datacenter in the region goes offline. Which two deployment choices should the administrator use? Select two.

Place the VMs in the same availability set.

An availability set helps with host and update domain failures, but it does not protect against a full zone-level outage.

Use a proximity placement group for the VMs.

A proximity placement group improves latency by keeping resources close together, but it is not a resilience feature.

Use a snapshot of the operating system disk.

A snapshot helps with recovery, but it does not keep a running workload available during an outage.

What does this AZ-104 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Deploy the VMs in different availability zones. — To survive a datacenter failure, the workload must be spread across separate availability zones in a region that supports them. A zone places compute in physically separate datacenters, so one failure does not take down every VM. An availability set is useful for host maintenance and rack-level resiliency, but it does not provide the same protection as zones. Therefore, the correct choices are to use a zone-enabled region and deploy across availability zones. Why others are wrong: An availability set improves availability inside the same logical cluster, not against a complete zone outage. A proximity placement group is a performance optimization, not a high-availability design. A snapshot is a recovery artifact, but it does not keep services online while the VM is running. The question asks for choices that keep the workload running during a datacenter failure, so only zonal deployment fits.

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.