Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
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 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
Availability zones in separate datacenters
Zones add datacenter isolation that the requirement does not need and may add unnecessary placement complexity.
B
Best answer
An availability set
Availability sets protect against host and maintenance failures while keeping the VMs in one region and close together.
C
Distractor review
A proximity placement group
A proximity placement group improves locality but does not itself provide host-failure resilience.
D
Distractor review
A single VM scale set instance
A single instance cannot provide high availability for two backend servers or protect against host issues.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
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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?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: An availability set — An availability set is the correct choice because the requirement is specifically about surviving host patching or host failures, not a datacenter outage. Availability sets place VMs across fault and update domains within the same region, which gives basic high availability while keeping the VMs relatively close for predictable network latency. That makes it the right fit for a two-VM backend that does not need zone-level isolation. Why others are wrong: Availability zones would solve a larger failure domain problem than required and add operational complexity the business did not ask for. A proximity placement group only optimizes physical closeness and does not protect against a host failure on its own. A single VM scale set instance is not high availability, because one failed instance still means the service is down.
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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