AZ-104 Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Practice Question
Which three of the following are valid ways to achieve high availability for a virtual machine workload running in Azure? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse high-availability mechanisms (like redundancy and automatic failover) with performance improvements (Premium SSD) or data protection (Azure Backup), leading candidates to select options that improve speed or recovery but do not ensure continuous uptime.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Deploy the VM inside an Availability Set with two or more VMs.
Deploying a VM inside an Availability Set with two or more VMs ensures high availability by placing the VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains within a single Azure datacenter. This protects against hardware failures and planned maintenance events, as at least one VM remains available during an outage or update cycle.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy the VM inside an Availability Set with two or more VMs.
Why this is correct
An Availability Set distributes your VMs across multiple fault domains and update domains within an Azure datacenter. By deploying two or more VMs in the set, Azure guarantees that during hardware failures (fault domain) or planned maintenance (update domain), at least one VM instance remains running, thereby providing high availability within a single region.
- ✓
Use an Availability Zone by deploying VMs into different zones within the same region.
Why this is correct
Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across different zones protects against a complete datacenter failure, as traffic can continue to the VMs in the surviving zone. This is a higher-level resilience than an Availability Set because it spans multiple buildings.
- ✓
Configure a VM Scale Set with a minimum instance count of 2 and spread across fault domains.
Why this is correct
A VM Scale Set with a minimum instance count of 2 ensures that at least two VM instances are always running. The scale set automatically spreads instances across fault domains, so if a hardware failure occurs in one domain, the other domain's instances continue to serve traffic and the scale set can automatically replace failed instances, preserving high availability.
- ✗
Assign a public IP address to each VM to enable load balancing.
Why it's wrong here
Assigning a public IP address to each VM only gives each machine an internet endpoint; it does not provide load balancing or failover capability. Without a load balancer or similar traffic distribution mechanism, a single VM failure will still make that VM's IP unreachable, and there is no automatic rerouting to healthy VMs. Public IPs are not a high-availability feature.
- ✗
Set the VM’s operating system disk to a Premium SSD tier to reduce disk latency.
Why it's wrong here
Premium SSD tier improves disk I/O performance and reduces latency, but it does not affect VM availability. High availability is about minimizing downtime due to failures; even with a fast disk, the VM can still be affected by hardware faults, maintenance events, or other outages. Disk performance is a scalability/perfomance feature, not a resilience feature.
- ✗
Enable Azure Backup on the VM to protect against regional disasters.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a data-protection service that creates restore points for recovery from data loss or corruption. It does not provide continuous availability; restoring from a backup typically requires downtime and manual or scripted recovery steps. While helpful for disaster recovery, it is not a high-availability solution because the VM itself is not automatically kept running.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managed Identities for Azure Resources
Key term
Availability set
An Availability set is a cloud computing feature that groups virtual machines across multiple fault domains and update domains to ensure high availability during hardware failures or planned maintenance.
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-104 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-104 exam.