Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
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?
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 the VMs placed in different update domains.
Availability sets protect against host maintenance and some hardware failures, but not a full datacenter outage.
B
Best answer
Two VMs placed in different availability zones within the region.
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.
C
Distractor review
A proximity placement group so both VMs stay physically close together.
A proximity placement group improves latency, but it does not provide failure isolation for datacenter outages.
D
Distractor review
A single VM with Premium SSD storage and automatic restart.
A single VM is still a single point of failure and cannot meet the availability requirement.
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: Two VMs placed in different availability zones within the region. — Availability zones are the correct deployment model when the business wants resilience against an entire datacenter failure within a supported Azure region. Each zone is physically separated and independently powered and cooled. By placing the app's VMs across zones, you reduce the chance that one localized outage takes the whole workload down. This is stronger protection than an availability set, which only handles host-level faults and maintenance. Why others are wrong: An availability set helps with planned maintenance and host faults, but it does not span datacenters. A proximity placement group optimizes closeness, not redundancy. A single VM has no meaningful high availability at all. The question's wording specifically calls out a datacenter failure, which points directly to zones.
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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