AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
This AZ-104 practice question tests your understanding of deploy and manage azure compute. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
Two backend VMs must remain available if an Azure host is patched or fails. A full datacenter outage is not part of the requirement, and the team wants the VMs to stay in the same region with predictable east-west latency. Which placement option should the administrator choose?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
An availability set
An availability set distributes VMs across multiple fault domains (separate physical racks with independent power, cooling, and network) within a single Azure datacenter. This protects against host patching and hardware failures while keeping VMs in the same datacenter, ensuring predictable east-west latency. The requirement explicitly excludes a full datacenter outage, so availability zones (which span separate datacenters) are unnecessary.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Availability zones in separate datacenters
Why it's wrong here
Zones add datacenter isolation that the requirement does not need and may add unnecessary placement complexity.
✓
An availability set
Why this is correct
Availability sets protect against host and maintenance failures while keeping the VMs in one region and close together.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
A proximity placement group
Why it's wrong here
A proximity placement group improves locality but does not itself provide host-failure resilience.
✗
A single VM scale set instance
Why it's wrong here
A single instance cannot provide high availability for two backend servers or protect against host issues.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse availability zones (which protect against datacenter failures) with availability sets (which protect against host failures within a single datacenter), leading them to choose zones even when the requirement explicitly excludes a full datacenter outage.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
An availability set uses fault domains (up to 3) and update domains (up to 20) to ensure VMs are on different physical hardware and not rebooted simultaneously during planned maintenance. The Azure fabric controller guarantees that VMs in the same availability set are placed on separate racks, each with independent power and network switches, achieving a 99.95% SLA for multi-VM deployments. This is ideal for traditional N-tier applications where low latency within a datacenter is critical.
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.
TExam Day Tips
→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.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this AZ-104 question in full detail.
Deploy and Manage Azure Compute — This question tests Deploy and Manage Azure Compute — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: An availability set — An availability set distributes VMs across multiple fault domains (separate physical racks with independent power, cooling, and network) within a single Azure datacenter. This protects against host patching and hardware failures while keeping VMs in the same datacenter, ensuring predictable east-west latency. The requirement explicitly excludes a full datacenter outage, so availability zones (which span separate datacenters) are unnecessary.
What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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