Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
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?
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 one update domain per VM.
An availability set protects against host maintenance and hardware failures, but it does not protect against an entire datacenter becoming unavailable.
B
Best answer
Availability zones with the VMs distributed across zones.
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.
C
Distractor review
A single VM with a premium SSD data disk.
A single VM is a single point of failure and does not meet the requirement for staying available during a datacenter outage.
D
Distractor review
An Azure proximity placement group.
A proximity placement group improves latency by placing resources close together, but it does not provide fault isolation for a datacenter outage.
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 with the VMs distributed across zones. — Availability zones are the correct answer because the requirement is explicitly about surviving a whole datacenter outage. Zones place VMs in separate physical locations within the same Azure region, so the application can continue even if one zone is affected. This is the right level of resilience for the scenario and is stronger than an availability set, which only addresses host-level failures. Why others are wrong: An availability set only covers host maintenance and hardware issues, not a full datacenter loss. A single VM cannot provide high availability. A proximity placement group is about performance and placement, not resilience, so it does not solve the outage requirement.
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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