A development VM is rebuilt often and does not need its operating system disk contents to survive deallocation. The team wants the lowest practical disk latency for the OS. Which disk option should the administrator choose?
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.
Best answer
Ephemeral OS disk
An ephemeral OS disk is stored on the host and offers very low latency, which fits temporary or rebuildable VMs.
Distractor review
Standard HDD managed disk
Standard HDD is economical, but it provides lower performance and higher latency than the other options.
Distractor review
Geo-redundant storage for the OS disk
Geo-redundancy is a storage replication concept, not the best answer for local OS disk latency.
Distractor review
A data disk formatted as the boot disk
Using a data disk as a boot disk is not the normal Azure VM deployment pattern.
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: Ephemeral OS disk — An ephemeral OS disk is the best fit because it provides low-latency operating system storage on the host rather than on durable remote storage. It is intended for scenarios where the VM can be rebuilt and does not need the OS disk to persist after deallocation. That makes it a strong choice for temporary, test, or stateless deployment patterns. Why others are wrong: Standard HDD is cheaper but slower, so it does not meet the low-latency requirement well. Geo-redundant storage is about replication and durability, not OS disk performance. A data disk is not a proper substitute for the OS boot disk in a standard Azure VM deployment.
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.
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