Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
Two legacy application VMs must survive planned maintenance and a single host failure. The vendor requires both VMs to stay in the same region, and a datacenter outage is not part of the requirement. What should the administrator use?
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 with one VM in each zone.
Zones provide stronger protection than needed here and are aimed at datacenter-level failure scenarios.
B
Best answer
An availability set that places the VMs in separate fault and update domains.
Availability sets are designed for host-level resilience inside one datacenter. They spread VMs across fault domains and update domains, which helps reduce impact from hardware failures and planned maintenance. Because the requirement does not include surviving a full datacenter outage, an availability set is the right level of protection without the added complexity of zones.
C
Distractor review
A virtual machine scale set in a single zone.
A VM scale set helps with identical instances and scaling, but it does not by itself address the stated availability design.
D
Distractor review
A proximity placement group for both VMs.
Proximity placement groups are for low latency placement, not for reducing maintenance or host-failure impact.
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: An availability set that places the VMs in separate fault and update domains. — An availability set is the best fit because the requirement is specifically about host-level and maintenance resilience within the same region. Azure distributes availability set VMs across fault domains and update domains so a single host or maintenance event does not take both systems offline. Since the business does not require protection from a full datacenter outage, zones would add unnecessary complexity and cost. Why others are wrong: Availability zones solve a bigger problem than the one described, so they are more than necessary. A VM scale set is about managing identical instances and scaling, not just protecting two legacy VMs from maintenance. Proximity placement groups are about latency and placement optimization, not redundancy or failover behavior.
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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