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.

• ✗

  Place the VMs in the same availability set.

  Why it's wrong here

  An availability set distributes VMs across fault domains and update domains within a single Azure datacenter. It protects against host hardware failures and planned maintenance events by ensuring replicas are on different physical servers, but it does not protect against an entire datacenter or zone outage. Since the question implies a production app needing resilience to a datacenter-level failure, an availability set is insufficient.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the requirement was to protect against hardware failures (e.g., server or rack failures) within a single datacenter, while ensuring high availability for the VMs, an availability set would be the correct choice.

• ✓

  Deploy the VMs across availability zones.

  Why this is correct

  Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Spreading the three VMs across zones ensures that if one zone fails, the other two remain available, providing high availability for the production application. This directly mitigates the risk of a full datacenter outage, which is the core requirement here.

• ✗

  Use a proximity placement group for the VMs.

  Why it's wrong here

  A proximity placement group is designed to co-locate VMs to minimize network latency, but it deliberately places VMs as close as possible, often within the same datacenter or rack. This increases the blast radius of an infrastructure failure rather than isolating it, because all VMs may go down if that single location fails. It does not provide datacenter-level fault isolation, so it fails to satisfy the resilience requirement.

  When this WOULD be correct

  An application requires the lowest possible network latency between VMs (e.g., for high-performance computing or tightly coupled workloads) and does not need datacenter-level fault tolerance.

• ✗

  Attach the VMs to the same Azure Load Balancer backend pool.

  Why it's wrong here

  An Azure Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic across healthy VMs in a backend pool, but it provides no physical redundancy for the underlying infrastructure. The VMs could all reside in the same availability zone or even the same rack, so a datacenter failure would take down the entire backend pool and the load balancer's health probe would have no healthy targets. Load balancing alone does not alter the physical placement or fault tolerance of the VMs.

  When this WOULD be correct

  A question where the requirement is to distribute incoming traffic across multiple VMs for load balancing and high availability within a single datacenter, without needing to survive a full datacenter outage. For example: 'You need to distribute web traffic evenly across two VMs in the same region while providing health probing.'

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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Same concept, more angles

1 more way this is tested on AZ-104

These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.