AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
Exhibit
Requirement note: - ProductionApp must stay online during a single datacenter outage. - Region: East US 2 - The region supports multiple availability zones. - Two Windows VMs will host the app tier.
Based on the exhibit, which deployment choice should the administrator use to keep the application available if one datacenter in the Azure region fails?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse availability sets (which protect against rack failures) with availability zones (which protect against datacenter failures), leading them to incorrectly choose an availability set for datacenter-level resilience.
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
✓
Deploy the VMs across separate availability zones.
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across separate availability zones ensures that if one datacenter fails, the application remains available in the other zone, providing resilience against datacenter-level failures.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Place both VMs in the same availability set.
Why it's wrong here
An availability set distributes VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains inside a single datacenter, protecting against hardware rack failures and planned maintenance events. However, availability sets are scoped to one datacenter; they do not span across separate datacenters or availability zones. If that entire datacenter goes down, all VMs in the availability set fail together, so this does not meet the requirement for surviving a single datacenter outage.
When this WOULD be correct
If the question required high availability for VMs within a single datacenter (e.g., to protect against hardware failure or maintenance within the same datacenter), placing VMs in the same availability set would be correct.
- ✓
Deploy the VMs across separate availability zones.
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in physically separate datacenters within the region. If one datacenter fails, the other zone can continue serving traffic. This matches the requirement for surviving a single datacenter outage and is the preferred Azure design when zone support is available.
- ✗
Use a proximity placement group for both VMs.
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group is used to co-locate VMs in the same physical datacenter or availability zone to minimize network latency for tightly coupled workloads. However, this co-location creates a single point of failure: if the underlying datacenter experiences an outage, every VM in the placement group becomes unavailable simultaneously. It does not provide any fault isolation across datacenters, so it cannot satisfy the requirement to survive a full datacenter failure.
- ✗
Use a larger VM size for each virtual machine.
Why it's wrong here
Selecting a larger VM size (more vCPUs, RAM, or local storage) addresses performance and capacity requirements, such as handling higher throughput or memory-intensive workloads, but it has no effect on availability characteristics. A larger VM still resides within a single datacenter and inherits the same failure domain as any other VM in that location. Changing the size does not introduce redundancy or distribute workloads across independent infrastructure, so it cannot mitigate a datacenter-wide outage.
When this WOULD be correct
In a scenario where the application is experiencing performance bottlenecks due to insufficient compute resources and the question asks for a solution to improve throughput or reduce latency without changing the number of VMs.
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.
✓Deploy the VMs across separate availability zones.Correct answer▾
Why this is correct
Availability zones place resources in physically separate datacenters within the region. If one datacenter fails, the other zone can continue serving traffic. This matches the requirement for surviving a single datacenter outage and is the preferred Azure design when zone support is available.
✗Place both VMs in the same availability set.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
An availability set protects against rack-level failures within a single datacenter, not against a full datacenter failure. If one datacenter fails, all VMs in the same availability set (which are in that datacenter) become unavailable.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
If the question required high availability for VMs within a single datacenter (e.g., to protect against hardware failure or maintenance within the same datacenter), placing VMs in the same availability set would be correct.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates often confuse availability sets with availability zones, thinking that an availability set provides redundancy across datacenters, when it only provides redundancy within a single datacenter.
✗Use a larger VM size for each virtual machine.Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Larger VM sizes improve performance but do not provide redundancy or fault isolation; if a datacenter fails, all VMs in that datacenter are affected regardless of size.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
In a scenario where the application is experiencing performance bottlenecks due to insufficient compute resources and the question asks for a solution to improve throughput or reduce latency without changing the number of VMs.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may mistakenly believe that larger VMs are more resilient or that higher capacity inherently protects against failures, confusing performance scaling with availability.
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.
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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.