Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A production application runs on three Azure VMs in a region that supports availability zones. The business wants the application to remain available if one datacenter in the region fails. What should the administrator 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
An availability set
An availability set helps protect against host and update domain failures, but it does not place VMs in different datacenters within a region. It is useful for host-level resilience, not for surviving a full zone or datacenter outage.
B
Best answer
Availability zones
Availability zones place VMs in separate datacenters within the same Azure region. If one datacenter or zone fails, the VMs in the remaining zones can continue running. This is the correct choice when the requirement is resilience against a zone-level or datacenter-level outage.
C
Distractor review
A managed disk snapshot
A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a disk used for backup or restore. It does not keep the application running during an outage and does not distribute VMs across separate failure domains. It is a recovery tool, not high availability.
D
Distractor review
A proximity placement group
A proximity placement group places resources physically close together to reduce latency. It is the opposite of what is needed for datacenter failure resilience because it does not spread VMs across independent failure boundaries.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
- Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.
TExam Day Tips
- Underline the problem statement mentally.
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
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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?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Availability zones — Availability zones are the correct design when the application must keep running if one datacenter in a region fails. Zones are physically separate locations with independent power, cooling, and networking. By placing VMs across zones, you reduce the chance that a single localized failure takes down all instances of the application. Why others are wrong: An availability set protects against host-level issues but not a datacenter-wide outage. A snapshot helps recovery later, not immediate availability. A proximity placement group improves latency by keeping resources close together, which does not satisfy the resilience requirement.
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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