Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Compute High Availability

A university is designing the compute infrastructure for a student registration portal that will run on Azure Virtual Machines. The registration portal experiences high seasonal traffic and must remain resilient during infrastructure updates or datacenter-level disruptions. The portal requires a virtual machine uptime SLA of at least 99.99%99.99\%.

Which two actions should you include in the design? (Select two.)

  1. Deploy at least two virtual machines for the portal.Answer
  2. Distribute the virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy all virtual machines within a single Availability Zone.
  4. D
    Deploy the virtual machines in an Availability Set.

Answer

To meet the requirement, you should deploy at least two virtual machines for the portal and distribute the virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region.
To achieve a 99.99%99.99\% uptime SLA for Azure Virtual Machines, you must deploy two or more instances across two or more Availability Zones in the same region. This ensures that even if one datacenter or zone undergoes an outage, the application remains available on the instances in the other zone(s).

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the SLA requirement of 99.99%99.99\%.
The architecture must support zone-redundant high availability.
An SLA of 99.99%99.99\% is only offered by Azure when virtual machines are distributed across multiple Availability Zones in the same region.
2
Evaluate the minimum instance count.
A minimum of two VM instances is required.
A single VM cannot meet the multi-instance zone SLA, even if configured with premium storage.
3
Reject single zone and Availability Set options.
Discard deployment of VMs in a single Availability Zone or an Availability Set.
Availability Sets only guarantee a 99.95%99.95\% SLA, and single-zone deployments do not protect against datacenter outages, violating the SLA and availability requirements.

Key Concept

Azure VM High Availability SLA
Rate this question