A company plans to deploy a stateless web application on Azure virtual machines. They want to ensure that the application remains available in the event of a hardware failure within a single Azure datacenter. The VMs must be placed in a way that ensures they are on different physical servers and racks, but are still within the same datacenter. Which deployment strategy should they use?

Deploy the VMs in different Availability Zones.

Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within a region. They protect against a datacenter failure, not just hardware failure within a single datacenter.

Deploy the VMs in a single Virtual Machine Scale Set with a large instance count.

A scale set distributes VMs across fault domains only if configured with a placement group. The primary purpose is auto-scaling, not guaranteed fault isolation for a small number of VMs.

Deploy each VM in a separate resource group.

Resource groups are logical containers and do not provide any physical fault isolation. VMs in different resource groups can still reside on the same physical host.

What does this AZ-305 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Deploy the VMs in an Availability Set. — Availability sets distribute VMs across multiple fault domains (physical servers, racks) and update domains within a datacenter. This protects against hardware failures and planned maintenance. Availability zones span across separate datacenters (zones), which is unnecessary for the stated requirement for a single-datacenter hardware failure. Scale sets with placement groups are not designed for fault isolation.

What should I do if I get this AZ-305 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.