AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
A customer-facing application runs on two Azure VMs. The business wants the application to stay available even if one datacenter in the Azure region has an outage. Which availability option should the administrator use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Availability Sets (which protect against rack-level failures within one datacenter) with Availability Zones (which protect against full datacenter outages), leading them to choose the cheaper but insufficient option A.
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
✓
Availability zones
Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. By deploying the two VMs into different zones, the application remains available if one entire datacenter fails, meeting the requirement for datacenter-level fault tolerance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Availability set
Why it's wrong here
An availability set spreads VMs across fault domains and update domains within a single Azure datacenter. While it protects against hardware failures and planned maintenance events in that datacenter, a fire, flood, or other catastrophic failure that takes down the entire facility will still affect all VMs in the set. Because the customer-facing application must survive a full datacenter outage, an availability set is insufficient—that level of isolation requires physically separate zones.
When this WOULD be correct
An administrator needs to ensure high availability for two VMs within a single datacenter, protecting against hardware failures or updates within the same datacenter. The question would specify 'within a single datacenter' or 'rack-level failure'.
- ✓
Availability zones
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in physically separate datacenters within the same Azure region. That gives the application protection against a full datacenter failure, which is the scenario described. When the workload must survive a zone outage, zones are the right resiliency choice rather than a same-datacenter availability set.
- ✗
Proximity placement group
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group is used to co-locate VMs in the same Azure region to achieve the lowest possible network latency between them. It intentionally places resources close together, often in the same datacenter, which is the opposite of the fault isolation needed here. While it can be combined with availability zones for latency-sensitive workloads, by itself it does not provide any protection against a datacenter-wide failure, so it cannot meet the requirement.
When this WOULD be correct
A question asks: 'An application requires the lowest possible network latency between two VMs for a high-performance computing workload. Which option should be used?' In that scenario, a proximity placement group is correct because it ensures VMs are in the same datacenter to minimize latency.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer distributes inbound network traffic across a set of backend VMs and performs health probes to route around failed individual instances. It operates at layer 4 and is a traffic distribution and high-availability component, not a placement or fault-isolation mechanism. Even if the load balancer itself is zone-redundant, it cannot protect the backend VMs from a single datacenter outage unless those VMs are deployed across availability zones; the load balancer alone does not determine where the VMs reside.
When this WOULD be correct
An administrator needs to distribute incoming traffic across multiple VMs in the same region to improve application responsiveness and provide fault tolerance for VM-level failures, but the question does not require protection against a full datacenter outage.
Option-by-option analysis
Why each answer is right or wrong
Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The AZ-104 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.
✓Availability zonesCorrect answer▾
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in physically separate datacenters within the same Azure region. That gives the application protection against a full datacenter failure, which is the scenario described. When the workload must survive a zone outage, zones are the right resiliency choice rather than a same-datacenter availability set.
✗Availability setWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Availability sets protect against rack-level failures within a single datacenter, not against an entire datacenter outage. They do not provide cross-datacenter redundancy.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An administrator needs to ensure high availability for two VMs within a single datacenter, protecting against hardware failures or updates within the same datacenter. The question would specify 'within a single datacenter' or 'rack-level failure'.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates often confuse availability sets with availability zones, thinking both provide datacenter-level redundancy, but availability sets only protect against failures within one datacenter.
✗Proximity placement groupWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Proximity placement groups reduce network latency by keeping VMs close together, but they do not protect against datacenter-level outages. The question requires resilience across datacenters, which proximity placement groups cannot provide.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
A question asks: 'An application requires the lowest possible network latency between two VMs for a high-performance computing workload. Which option should be used?' In that scenario, a proximity placement group is correct because it ensures VMs are in the same datacenter to minimize latency.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse the goal of high availability with low latency, thinking that grouping VMs closely together ensures availability, but proximity placement groups actually increase the risk of simultaneous failure.
✗Azure Load BalancerWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Azure Load Balancer distributes traffic across VMs but does not protect against a datacenter outage within a region; it requires VMs in separate availability zones or regions to provide that resilience.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An administrator needs to distribute incoming traffic across multiple VMs in the same region to improve application responsiveness and provide fault tolerance for VM-level failures, but the question does not require protection against a full datacenter outage.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may think a load balancer inherently provides high availability across datacenters, but it only distributes load; without VMs in separate zones, it cannot survive a zone failure.
Analysis generated from the official AZ-104blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Identities for Azure Resources
Key term
Region
A region is a distinct geographic location where a cloud provider operates multiple data centers that are connected by low-latency networks and provide cloud services.
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.
About these practice questions
This AZ-104 question is part of Courseiva's 1,049-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-104 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft 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 AZ-104 exam.