Question

Difficulty: MediumApplication Load Balancing and Delivery

An organization is designing a regional high-availability solution in the East US region. The architecture requires deploying a Standard Load Balancer to distribute inbound traffic across three Azure Virtual Machines that are deployed across different Availability Zones. The virtual machines currently have Basic SKU Public IP addresses assigned to their network interfaces for direct administrative access. During validation of the backend pool configuration, the deployment fails.

To ensure the virtual machines can be successfully added to the Standard Load Balancer's backend pool while maintaining zone redundancy, which of the following actions should the architect recommend?

  1. Upgrade the public IP addresses of the virtual machines to the Standard SKU.Answer
  2. B
    Downgrade the Standard Load Balancer to a Basic Load Balancer to match the SKU of the virtual machines' public IP addresses.
  3. C
    Deploy Azure Traffic Manager to distribute traffic directly to the virtual machines' current Basic SKU Public IP addresses.
  4. D
    Configure a Basic SKU Public IP prefix and associate it with the Standard Load Balancer's frontend IP configuration.

Answer

Upgrade the public IP addresses of the virtual machines to the Standard SKU.
The correct action is to upgrade the public IP addresses of the virtual machines to the Standard SKU. A Standard Load Balancer strictly requires that all virtual machines in its backend pool use the Standard SKU for any associated public IP addresses. This solution enables successful backend validation and retains support for Availability Zones and high availability.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the load balancer SKU and its requirements.
The design utilizes a Standard Load Balancer, which requires that any public IP addresses associated with backend pool virtual machines must also be of the Standard SKU.
Standard SKU resources must be consistently used throughout the load balancer boundary to prevent configuration and validation failures.
2
Evaluate the requirement for zone redundancy.
A Standard Load Balancer and Standard SKU public IPs support Availability Zones, whereas Basic SKU load balancers and Basic public IPs do not.
To satisfy the high-availability and zone redundancy requirements, the architecture must remain on the Standard SKU.
3
Identify the remediation action.
Upgrading the virtual machines' public IP addresses from Basic to Standard SKU satisfies both the Standard Load Balancer validation and the zone redundancy constraints.
This alignment allows the virtual machines to be members of the Standard Load Balancer's backend pool without losing zone redundancy features.

Key Concept

Standard SKU load balancers require all backend resources with public IP addresses to use the Standard SKU to ensure compatibility and support features like Availability Zones.
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