Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A customer runs two Windows VMs in a region that does not support availability zones. The app can lose one VM but must keep running through planned maintenance and a single host failure. Which deployment pattern should you use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Use a single-instance deployment and add more backup jobs.
Backups help recovery after a failure, but a single VM still has a single point of failure during maintenance or host loss.
B
Best answer
Place both VMs in an availability set.
An availability set spreads VMs across fault domains and update domains within one datacenter boundary. That protects the application from planned maintenance and from a single host or rack failure. Because the region does not support availability zones, the availability set is the best way to improve uptime for two VMs that can tolerate one instance being unavailable.
C
Distractor review
Use availability zones because they always exist in every region.
Availability zones are not available in every Azure region, so this choice fails the stated environment constraint.
D
Distractor review
Put both VMs on the same dedicated host to avoid migration during maintenance.
A dedicated host can help with placement control, but it does not give the same fault-domain protection as an availability set.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A route table contains these entries: 10.0.0.0/8 with next hop Virtual appliance, and 10.1.1.0/24 with next hop Virtual network gateway. Which next hop will Azure use for traffic to 10.1.1.5?
Question 2
You are deploying a stateless web application on Azure virtual machines. The solution must automatically add and remove instances based on CPU demand and allow all instances to be managed as one logical group. Which Azure compute feature should you deploy?
Question 3
You are deploying a Windows Server VM for an internal app. The VM must support Secure Boot and vTPM later, its OS disk must survive host moves, and the team wants the lowest-cost managed disk tier that still behaves like a normal writable OS disk. Which two choices should you make? Select two.
Question 4
You need to deploy several identical virtual machines and ensure that the failure of a single Azure host does not affect all of them. Which feature should you use?
Question 5
You need to connect VNet-Hub and VNet-Spoke so that resources in both virtual networks can communicate privately over the Microsoft backbone. Both virtual networks are in the same region. What should you configure?
Question 6
You need to create a storage account that provides the lowest-cost redundant storage for non-critical data and only needs protection against local disk or server failure within a single datacenter. Which redundancy option should you choose?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
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 an availability set. — An availability set is the correct design when zones are unavailable but you still need protection from planned maintenance and a single host failure. Azure places VMs in different update and fault domains so they are not all rebooted or lost together. Because the application can tolerate one VM being down, distributing the two VMs in an availability set meets the requirement without assuming zone support. Why others are wrong: A single-instance deployment still leaves the app exposed to one host outage or maintenance event. Availability zones are not a valid answer when the region does not support them. A dedicated host changes host allocation but does not replace the fault-domain and update-domain behavior of an availability set.
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.
Discussion
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