Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
Two application VMs run in the same Azure region. The business wants to reduce the chance that both VMs are rebooted during planned host maintenance, but a datacenter outage is not part of the requirement. What should the administrator configure?
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
Best answer
Availability set
An availability set spreads VMs across fault domains and update domains within a datacenter. This reduces the chance that all instances are affected by the same host maintenance event. It is the correct choice when the goal is host-level resilience rather than protection against an entire datacenter outage.
B
Distractor review
Availability zone
Availability zones are used to protect against a full datacenter or zone failure, which is more than the requirement asks for.
C
Distractor review
Azure Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes traffic, but it does not place VMs into different maintenance or fault domains.
D
Distractor review
Virtual machine scale set
A scale set helps with scaling and instance management, but it is not the simplest answer for host-maintenance protection only.
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 set — An availability set is the right choice when you want multiple VMs to be separated across fault domains and update domains. That placement helps reduce the chance that all VMs are restarted at the same time during planned maintenance or a localized hardware issue. Because the scenario does not require protection from an entire datacenter failure, an availability set is the simplest correct design. Why others are wrong: Availability zones protect against a broader failure scope and are unnecessary when only host-level maintenance resilience is requested. A load balancer improves traffic distribution but does not control placement. A virtual machine scale set is useful for scaling and instance management, but the key requirement here is maintaining separation during maintenance, which is an availability set feature.
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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