Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A public web application runs on two identical VMs behind a load balancer. The region supports availability zones. The business wants the app to keep serving traffic if one datacenter in the region becomes unavailable. 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 with two VMs
An availability set protects against host update and fault domain issues, but it does not provide datacenter-level separation across zones.
B
Best answer
Availability zones for the two VMs
Availability zones are the right design when the business needs resiliency against a full datacenter or zone outage within a supported region. Placing the VMs in different zones keeps the application available if one zone has a failure, assuming the load balancer and application are designed accordingly.
C
Distractor review
A single virtual machine scale set instance
A single instance scale set does not provide redundancy. If that instance fails, the application still goes down.
D
Distractor review
A proximity placement group
A proximity placement group can improve latency by co-locating resources, but it is not a resiliency mechanism for zone or datacenter loss.
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 for the two VMs — Availability zones are the correct choice because the requirement is to survive the loss of an entire datacenter in a region that supports zones. Zones place resources in physically separate datacenter locations with independent power, cooling, and networking. This gives stronger fault isolation than an availability set, which mainly protects against platform maintenance or hardware rack issues. For a two-VM web app, spreading instances across zones is the appropriate resiliency design. Why others are wrong: An availability set is useful for host-level failures, but it does not give the same level of geographic separation as zones. A single scale set instance is still a single point of failure. A proximity placement group improves performance characteristics, not availability during a zone outage.
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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