AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
Exhibit
Business requirement: - Three identical web VMs in one Azure region - The service must survive a datacenter outage - The environment can use zone-aware resources - The team wants to spread the VMs across separate physical locations
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse availability sets (which protect against rack-level failures) with availability zones (which protect against datacenter-level failures), leading candidates to choose an availability set when the question explicitly requires surviving an entire datacenter outage.
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
✓
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
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.
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 one update domain per VM.
Why it's wrong here
An availability set with one update domain per VM spreads the workload across different fault domains and update domains, but those domains are all within a single datacenter in an Azure region. This design protects you only from host maintenance events and localized hardware failures, not from an entire datacenter becoming unavailable. Since the scenario explicitly requires survival through a full datacenter outage, an availability set is insufficient.
When this WOULD be correct
This option would be correct if the question required high availability for VMs within a single datacenter, such as protecting against planned maintenance or hardware failures, and the region did not support availability zones.
- ✓
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
Why this is correct
Availability zones are the correct choice because they place resources in separate datacenters within the same region. That gives the application resilience if one datacenter or zone becomes unavailable. The scenario explicitly asks for datacenter-level protection, which is what zones are designed to provide.
- ✗
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.
Why it's wrong here
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk is a single point of failure; if that VM, its host, or its datacenter goes down, the workload stops regardless of disk performance. Premium SSDs offer high IOPS and low latency, but they do not provide instance redundancy or automatic failover. This option does not satisfy the requirement for continuous availability during a datacenter-level outage.
When this WOULD be correct
This option would be correct for a question requiring high-performance storage for a single VM, such as 'You need to maximize IOPS for a database VM running on a single node. What disk type should you use?'
- ✗
An Azure proximity placement group.
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group does not isolate the workload from a datacenter failure; it deliberately places VMs in the same physical location to minimize network latency and co-locate resources. That co-location increases the blast radius, because any datacenter or zone outage would affect every VM in the group. It is a performance optimization, not a high-availability architecture.
When this WOULD be correct
An Azure proximity placement group would be correct when the requirement is to minimize network latency between VMs in a high-performance computing or tightly coupled application, and the question does not require high availability across datacenters.
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.
✓Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.Correct answer▾
Why this is correct
Availability zones are the correct choice because they place resources in separate datacenters within the same region. That gives the application resilience if one datacenter or zone becomes unavailable. The scenario explicitly asks for datacenter-level protection, which is what zones are designed to provide.
✗An availability set with one update domain per VM.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
An availability set protects against failures within a single datacenter (rack/update domain failures), not against an entire datacenter becoming unavailable. The question requires resilience across datacenters, which availability sets cannot provide.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
This option would be correct if the question required high availability for VMs within a single datacenter, such as protecting against planned maintenance or hardware failures, and the region did not support availability zones.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse availability sets with availability zones, or think that multiple update domains provide datacenter-level redundancy, not understanding that availability sets are confined to one datacenter.
✗A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk does not provide high availability; it is a single point of failure. If the datacenter becomes unavailable, the VM and its data are inaccessible, failing to meet the requirement of keeping the workload running.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
This option would be correct for a question requiring high-performance storage for a single VM, such as 'You need to maximize IOPS for a database VM running on a single node. What disk type should you use?'
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may think premium SSD offers high reliability and performance, mistakenly believing it alone ensures availability, overlooking the need for redundancy across failure domains.
✗An Azure proximity placement group.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
A proximity placement group reduces network latency between VMs but does not protect against an entire datacenter failure because it does not distribute VMs across different availability zones or fault domains.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An Azure proximity placement group would be correct when the requirement is to minimize network latency between VMs in a high-performance computing or tightly coupled application, and the question does not require high availability across datacenters.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse proximity placement groups with high availability solutions, thinking that grouping VMs close together ensures they fail over together, but they overlook the need for fault isolation across datacenters.
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
Region
A region is a distinct geographic location where a cloud provider operates multiple data centers that are connected by low-latency networks and provide cloud services.
About these practice questions
This AZ-104 question is part of Courseiva's 1,049-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.