A company is deploying two Linux application VMs in Azure for a production workload. The region supports availability zones, and the business requires the workload to stay online if an entire datacenter in the region becomes unavailable. Which deployment choice best meets this requirement?

Place both VMs in the same availability set so Azure separates them across update domains.

Availability sets protect against update and fault domain issues, but they do not provide zone-level isolation across datacenters.

Use a single larger VM size with premium SSD storage for better uptime.

A larger VM may improve performance, but it still creates a single point of failure if that datacenter or host becomes unavailable.

Deploy the VMs in the same resource group and enable auto-shutdown.

Resource groups are only management containers, and auto-shutdown is meant for cost control rather than high availability.

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: Deploy the VMs across two availability zones in the same region. — Availability zones are the correct choice because they physically isolate resources across separate datacenters in a region. If one zone fails, the VMs in the other zone can continue serving traffic. This directly addresses the requirement to remain online during a datacenter outage. Availability sets help with planned maintenance and host failures, but they do not protect against a full zone failure. Why others are wrong: An availability set only spreads VMs across update and fault domains within a datacenter cluster, not across zones. A bigger VM does not improve fault tolerance. A resource group is not a resilience feature, and auto-shutdown reduces availability rather than improving it.

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.