AZ-900 Describe Azure architecture and services Practice Question
Which Azure service provides automatic failover and load balancing for SQL Server databases across multiple Azure VMs?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure SQL Database's built-in high availability (which is fully managed and includes automatic failover) with the IaaS-based SQL Server on Azure VMs, where you must configure Always On availability groups yourself to achieve similar automatic failover and load balancing.
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
✓
SQL Server Always On availability groups on Azure VMs
B is correct because SQL Server Always On availability groups on Azure VMs provide native high availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server, including automatic failover between replicas and built-in read/write load balancing via listener endpoints. This service operates at the SQL Server instance level, supporting multiple Azure VMs in an availability set or availability zone, and uses Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for health monitoring and automatic failover.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication is a PaaS feature of Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, not an offering for SQL Server installed on Azure VMs. It continuously replicates individual databases to a secondary Azure region but uses a different failover mechanism and does not integrate with SQL Server's availability group cluster semantics. Because the scenario explicitly targets SQL Server on Azure VMs, this option is out of scope and cannot deliver availability group functionality in that environment.
- ✓
SQL Server Always On availability groups on Azure VMs
Why this is correct
SQL Server Always On availability groups are a built-in SQL Server feature that operates at the database level by maintaining synchronous or asynchronous replicas of the database and using a Windows Server Failover Clustering health model to detect and automatically fail over the primary replica. Running on Azure VMs gives the full SQL Server engine feature set, including automatic failover, a virtual network listener for transparent client reconnection, and optional secondary replica read-only routing. This exactly matches the requirement for automatic failover and load balancing for SQL Server databases on Azure VMs.
- ✗
Azure Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 networking appliance that distributes inbound TCP/UDP traffic across back-end pool instances based on rules and health probes. It cannot query SQL Server's database state or know which replica is the current primary, so it cannot trigger a coordinated failover of an availability group. At most, it can sit in front of an availability group listener for traffic distribution, but that does not provide any database-level failover capability.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery replicates entire Azure VMs (or on-premises VMs/Hyper-V) to a secondary region for disaster recovery and orchestrates failover of those VM workloads. It is unaware of SQL Server availability group topologies and cannot perform per-database automatic failover or maintain the quorum and replica synchronization required by Always On. While it can protect a SQL Server VM's operating system and disks, it does not replace the database-engine-level health monitoring and failover of an availability group.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Regions and Geographies
Key term
Availability zone
An Availability Zone is a distinct, isolated location within a cloud region that contains its own power, cooling, and networking, designed to protect applications from single points of failure.
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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Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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