Which Azure feature guarantees high availability by placing virtual machines in different availability zones? Learn how Azure Availability Zones provide redundancy across physically separate data centers.
Table of Contents
Question
A company needs to ensure that their virtual machines are placed in different availability zones to provide high availability. Which Azure feature will help with this?
A. Azure Traffic Manager
B. Azure Availability Sets
C. Azure Blob Storage
D. Azure Virtual Network
E. Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Answer
B. Azure Availability Sets
Explanation
Azure Availability Sets ensure that virtual machines are deployed across multiple physical servers in different fault domains, improving availability in the event of hardware failure.
The correct Azure feature to ensure that virtual machines (VMs) are placed in different availability zones for high availability is Azure Availability Zones.
- Azure Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying VMs across multiple availability zones protects applications and data from data center failures, providing the highest level of resiliency and uptime (99.99% SLA).
- When you deploy VMs in different availability zones, each VM is placed in a separate data center, ensuring that a failure in one zone does not affect the others. This is the recommended approach for mission-critical workloads that require maximum availability and disaster isolation.
- Availability Sets, in contrast, distribute VMs across multiple fault and update domains within the same data center, protecting against localized hardware or maintenance failures but not entire data center outages.
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets can also be configured to span multiple availability zones, automatically distributing instances for high availability.
Correct Approach: To ensure VMs are placed in different availability zones, you must explicitly deploy them into separate zones using the Availability Zones feature, either individually or through a zone-aware Virtual Machine Scale Set.
Note: The provided answer, “B. Azure Availability Sets,” is incorrect for the scenario of distributing VMs across different availability zones. The correct answer should be “Availability Zones,” not “Availability Sets,” as sets only provide redundancy within a single data center, not across multiple zones.
Azure Availability Zones ensure high availability by placing VMs in physically separate data centers within a region, protecting against data center-level failures and delivering the highest SLA for critical workloads. Availability Sets only protect against failures within a single data center.
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 certification exam practice question and answer (Q&A) dump with detail explanation and reference available free, helpful to pass the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 exam and earn Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 certification.