AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Use a single-instance deployment and add more backup jobs.

  Why it's wrong here

  Backup jobs protect data and enable point-in-time restoration after a failure, but they do not provide high availability or automatic failover. A single-instance VM remains a single point of failure: if the underlying host experiences a planned or unplanned outage, the VM becomes unavailable, and recovery requires manual intervention to restore from backup or redeploy, incurring a potentially long recovery time objective (RTO). Backups are an essential part of disaster recovery, not an architecture for maintaining uptime during infrastructure events.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the requirement is to protect against data loss rather than ensure uptime, and the application can tolerate downtime for restoration, then a single-instance deployment with frequent backups would be appropriate.

• ✓

  Place both VMs in an availability set.

  Why this is correct

  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.

• ✗

  Use availability zones because they always exist in every region.

  Why it's wrong here

  Availability zones are not a universal feature of every Azure region; they exist only in regions that provide independent, physically separate datacenters with low-latency networking between them. The question explicitly states the target region does not support availability zones, so this option is invalid in the given environment. Even within zone-enabled regions, zone support varies by service and VM size, and the zone service is not implicitly available to all subscriptions or all architectures.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the question specified that the region supports availability zones and the requirement is to protect against a full datacenter failure (zone-level failure), then deploying VMs across multiple availability zones would be the correct answer.

• ✗

  Put both VMs on the same dedicated host to avoid migration during maintenance.

  Why it's wrong here

  Placing both VMs on the same dedicated host concentrates the failure domain: a single physical server hosts both VMs, so any hardware fault or maintenance event on that host affects them simultaneously, eliminating fault-domain isolation. While a dedicated host provides placement control and prevents cross-tenant interference, it does not provide automatic protection against host-level failures or Azure periodic maintenance the way an availability set does, which separates VMs across distinct fault and update domains.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the requirement was to isolate VMs from hardware maintenance and other tenants, and the application could tolerate a single host failure by using a different pattern (e.g., manual recovery), then a dedicated host would be correct. For example, a compliance scenario requiring physical isolation.

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.

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?”

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