Question 1hardmulti select
Full question →hardmulti selectObjective-mapped
An application runs on two identical VMs in a region that does not support availability zones. The app must keep running through planned maintenance and a single hardware fault, and the team does not want to add a second region. Which two deployment choices are appropriate? Select two.
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
Best answer
Place the VMs in an availability set.
An availability set spreads VMs across fault and update domains within the same datacenter scale unit, which protects against planned maintenance and single hardware failures. That matches the region’s lack of zones and the no-second-region requirement.
B
Best answer
Use a standard virtual machine scale set in the same region.
A standard VM scale set can spread instances across fault and update domains within a region and can manage multiple identical VMs. It is appropriate when you need platform-managed instance distribution without using availability zones.
C
Distractor review
Put both VMs in the same fault domain to simplify patching.
Placing both VMs in the same fault domain increases correlated failure risk. It defeats the purpose of resilience and would leave the app vulnerable to a single hardware failure.
D
Distractor review
Deploy the workload in availability zones anyway.
The scenario says the region does not support availability zones, so this option is not available. Even if it were, the question requires an answer that works in the stated region.
E
Distractor review
Use a second Azure region for the primary failover design.
A second region is a disaster recovery pattern, but the scenario explicitly says not to add another region. The question is about in-region resilience only.
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: Place the VMs in an availability set. — Because the region has no availability zones, the correct resilience choices are in-region constructs that still spread risk across failure boundaries. An availability set meets the maintenance and hardware-fault requirement, and a standard VM scale set also fits because it manages identical instances within the region and can distribute them across domains. Both are valid solutions when zone-based designs are unavailable. Why others are wrong: Putting both VMs in the same fault domain creates a single point of failure. Availability zones are unavailable in the stated region, so that choice cannot be used. A second region would solve a different problem—regional disaster recovery—but the scenario explicitly rules that out. The question is about in-region resilience, so the options that spread VMs across domains are the correct ones.
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.
Discussion
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