AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
You are designing a solution to provide high availability for a critical application running on Azure Virtual Machines. The virtual machines must be placed on physically separate hardware and have guaranteed availability during Azure maintenance events. Which option meets these requirements?
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 VMs in different Availability Zones
Availability Zones provide physically separate locations within an Azure region, protecting against datacenter failures and maintenance events. Option A (Availability Set) spreads VMs across fault and update domains within a single datacenter, not across separate physical facilities. Option B (Proximity Placement Group) is for low latency, not high availability. Option D (Virtual Machine Scale Set) is for auto-scaling and can be combined with Availability Zones, but alone it does not guarantee placement on separate hardware.
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 VMs in an Availability Set
Why it's wrong here
An Availability Set spreads VMs across fault domains within a single datacentre, which does not satisfy the physically separate hardware requirement across zones. It is tempting because it is the classic anti-affinity construct, and it would be correct for protecting against rack-level failures within one region.
- ✗
Deploy VMs in a Proximity Placement Group
Why it's wrong here
A Proximity Placement Group reduces network latency by co-locating VMs within a single datacentre; it does not place them on physically separate hardware, nor does it protect against host maintenance events. It suits tightly coupled, latency-sensitive workloads such as HPC clusters, not the fault-isolation requirement stated here.
- ✓
Deploy VMs in different Availability Zones
Why this is correct
Availability Zones are physically separate datacentres within a region, each with independent power, cooling and networking. Distributing VMs across zones satisfies the stem's physically separate hardware constraint and maintains availability during Azure maintenance affecting a single zone.
- ✗
Deploy VMs in a Virtual Machine Scale Set
Why it's wrong here
A Virtual Machine Scale Set provides elasticity and autoscaling across identical instances, but its default distribution offers no guarantee of separation across fault domains or protection during host maintenance. It is the right choice for demand-driven horizontal scaling, not for the physical hardware separation this scenario demands.
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