A line-of-business app runs on two Azure VMs in the same region. The business wants to reduce the chance that both VMs are affected by the same planned host update. What should the administrator use?

A public load balancer

A load balancer distributes traffic across healthy VMs, but it does not control how Azure places the VMs for resilience. If both VMs were on the same host or update domain, the load balancer would not prevent a maintenance event from affecting both at once.

A managed image

A managed image helps deploy consistent VMs but does not influence how Azure separates them for maintenance or hardware failure resilience. It is a deployment source, not an availability placement feature.

A private endpoint

A private endpoint provides private access to a PaaS service over a VNet. It has no effect on VM placement, fault domains, or host update behavior. It is unrelated to the availability requirement in this scenario.

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: An availability set — An availability set is the right answer when you want two or more VMs to be spread across fault and update domains so a host maintenance event is less likely to affect them all. This gives host-level resilience within a region. It is a common design for workloads that do not require zone-level separation but still need better uptime than standalone VMs. Why others are wrong: A load balancer improves traffic distribution but not VM placement. A managed image is only for standardized provisioning. A private endpoint is a networking feature for PaaS access and does not help with host update resilience. The question specifically asks about planned host updates, which points to availability sets.

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.