AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
An online transaction app uses two identical VMs in an Azure region that supports availability zones. The business wants the app to stay available if an entire datacenter in the region fails. What should the administrator deploy?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse availability sets (which protect against rack-level failures within a single datacenter) with availability zones (which protect against entire datacenter failures), leading them to choose Option A instead of B.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Two VMs placed in different availability zones within the region.
Deploying VMs in different availability zones protects against an entire datacenter failure. Each availability zone is a physically separate datacenter within an Azure region, with independent power, cooling, and networking. If one zone fails, the VM in the other zone remains available, ensuring business continuity for the app.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
An availability set with the VMs placed in different update domains.
Why it's wrong here
An availability set places VMs in the same datacenter and separates them across fault domains (shared hardware) and update domains (planned maintenance). This protects against host patching and localized hardware failures, but it cannot protect against a full datacenter outage because all VMs share the same datacenter infrastructure. For a workload that must survive a datacenter failure, availability sets are insufficient.
When this WOULD be correct
An administrator needs to protect VMs from hardware failures and maintenance within a single datacenter, but does not require resilience across datacenters. For example, deploying a two-tier app in a single datacenter where high availability within that datacenter is sufficient.
- ✓
Two VMs placed in different availability zones within the region.
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in separate datacenters inside the same region, so the workload can survive a complete zone or datacenter failure. For a requirement that explicitly includes datacenter-level resilience, zones are the correct choice. They provide stronger isolation than availability sets, which only protect against update domain and fault domain issues within a datacenter.
- ✗
A proximity placement group so both VMs stay physically close together.
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group intentionally co-locates VMs to reduce network latency for tightly coupled workloads. While this improves performance, it defeats availability: the VMs are placed in the same datacenter or even the same rack, so an outage at that location takes down both VMs simultaneously. It does not provide any fault isolation and therefore cannot meet the datacenter-resilience requirement.
When this WOULD be correct
An administrator needs to minimize network latency between two VMs for a high-performance computing workload, and the VMs must be in the same region. Deploying them in a proximity placement group ensures low latency.
- ✗
A single VM with Premium SSD storage and automatic restart.
Why it's wrong here
A single VM with Premium SSD storage and an automatic restart mechanism still represents a single point of failure. Premium SSD provides durable storage and a restart script might restore service after a crash, but it cannot help if the entire datacenter fails or the underlying hardware is unrecoverable. The workload has no redundancy, and Azure's SLA for a single VM is lower than for zone-redundant deployment, so it fails the high-availability requirement.
When this WOULD be correct
If the question asked for a cost-effective solution to handle a temporary OS crash or planned maintenance within a single datacenter, deploying a single VM with automatic restart would be correct.
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.
✓Two VMs placed in different availability zones within the region.Correct answer▾
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in separate datacenters inside the same region, so the workload can survive a complete zone or datacenter failure. For a requirement that explicitly includes datacenter-level resilience, zones are the correct choice. They provide stronger isolation than availability sets, which only protect against update domain and fault domain issues within a datacenter.
✗An availability set with the VMs placed in different update domains.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
An availability set protects against planned and unplanned maintenance within a single datacenter, not against an entire datacenter failure. The question requires protection from a full datacenter outage, which availability zones provide.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An administrator needs to protect VMs from hardware failures and maintenance within a single datacenter, but does not require resilience across datacenters. For example, deploying a two-tier app in a single datacenter where high availability within that datacenter is sufficient.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse availability sets with availability zones, thinking that update domains provide datacenter-level fault tolerance, or they may not fully understand the scope of protection each option offers.
✗A proximity placement group so both VMs stay physically close together.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
A proximity placement group reduces network latency by keeping VMs physically close, but it does not protect against an entire datacenter failure because all VMs could be in the same datacenter.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An administrator needs to minimize network latency between two VMs for a high-performance computing workload, and the VMs must be in the same region. Deploying them in a proximity placement group ensures low latency.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse high availability with low latency, thinking that placing VMs close together ensures availability, or they may not fully understand that availability zones provide datacenter-level fault isolation.
✗A single VM with Premium SSD storage and automatic restart.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
A single VM with Premium SSD and automatic restart cannot survive an entire datacenter failure; if the datacenter hosting that VM goes down, the VM becomes unavailable regardless of storage or restart policies.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
If the question asked for a cost-effective solution to handle a temporary OS crash or planned maintenance within a single datacenter, deploying a single VM with automatic restart would be correct.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may overestimate the protection offered by Premium SSD and automatic restart, mistakenly believing these features provide high availability against datacenter-level failures.
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?”
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Identities for Azure Resources
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
Key term
Availability zone
An Availability Zone is a distinct, isolated location within a cloud region that contains its own power, cooling, and networking, designed to protect applications from single points of failure.
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Same concept, more angles
3 more ways 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.
Variation 1. Based on the exhibit, which deployment change best meets the resilience requirement for the application VMs?
medium- A.Keep both VMs in the same availability set to spread them across update domains only.
- ✓ B.Place each VM in a different availability zone and keep the load balancer in front.
- C.Deploy both VMs into a proximity placement group to reduce latency between them.
- D.Move the VMs into a single availability set and add more managed disks for redundancy.
Why B: Deploying each VM into a different availability zone ensures that the VMs are physically separated across distinct data centers within an Azure region, protecting against zone-level failures. The load balancer in front distributes traffic across the VMs, providing high availability even if one zone goes offline. This meets the resilience requirement by eliminating a single point of failure at the data center level.
Variation 2. Based on the exhibit, the company will deploy two identical web server VMs in East US 2 behind a load balancer. The service must keep running if one datacenter in the region becomes unavailable. Which deployment choice best meets the requirement?
medium- A.Place both VMs in an availability set so Azure can spread them across fault domains.
- ✓ B.Place one VM in each of two availability zones and front them with the load balancer.
- C.Place both VMs in one availability zone because all zones in a region share failure domains.
- D.Deploy a single VM because Azure automatically replicates it across the region.
Why B: Deploying one VM in each of two availability zones within East US 2 ensures that the VMs are physically separated across distinct datacenters, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. If one datacenter (zone) fails, the other zone remains operational, and the load balancer automatically directs traffic to the healthy VM. This meets the requirement of keeping the service running if one datacenter in the region becomes unavailable.
Variation 3. Based on the exhibit, the workload must keep running if an entire datacenter in the region becomes unavailable. The region supports availability zones. What should you deploy?
easy- A.An availability set with one update domain per VM.
- ✓ B.Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
- C.A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.
- D.An Azure proximity placement group.
Why B: Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple zones ensures that if one entire datacenter fails, the workload continues running in the other zone(s), meeting the requirement for regional datacenter-level resilience.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-104 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-104 exam.