AZ-305 Availability Set Practice Question
Your organization runs a critical application on Azure VMs that must be highly available within a region. The application is stateful and requires shared storage. You need to design a solution that can automatically recover from a VM failure with minimal downtime. What should you include in the design?
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 VMs in an availability set and use Azure Shared Disks for the stateful data.
An availability set distributes VMs across fault domains and update domains within a datacenter, providing redundancy for VM failures. Azure Shared Disks enable multiple VMs to attach and access the same managed disk, fulfilling the shared storage requirement for stateful applications. Option A is incorrect because a single VM with Azure Backup does not provide automatic failover; backup is for data recovery, not high availability. Option B is incorrect because Azure NetApp Files is a shared storage service, but deploying VMs in different Availability Zones introduces cross-zone latency and is not necessary for intra-region HA; an availability set is more suitable for stateful apps requiring shared disks. Option C is incorrect because Azure Site Recovery replicates to a secondary region for disaster recovery, not for automatic recovery within a region.
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 a single VM with premium storage and Azure Backup for recovery.
Why it's wrong here
Single point of failure.
- ✗
Deploy the VMs in different Availability Zones and use Azure NetApp Files for storage.
Why it's wrong here
Availability Zones are for regional resilience, but shared disk requirement is not met.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VM to a secondary region.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-region DR, not intra-region HA.
- ✓
Deploy the VMs in an availability set and use Azure Shared Disks for the stateful data.
Why this is correct
Availability set protects from rack-level failures, and shared disks enable automatic failover.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Elastic SAN for Storage Architecture
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 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-305 exam.