Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Compute High Availability

An energy utility provider is designing the compute infrastructure for a critical smart-grid telemetry ingestion service on Azure. The service runs on Azure Virtual Machines and requires a continuous uptime SLA of 99.99%99.99\% for the virtual machine instances. The solution must remain resilient against utility power grid failures affecting individual datacenters within the primary Azure region. Which compute deployment strategy should you recommend?

  1. A
    Deploy a single virtual machine with Ultra Disk storage.
  2. B
    Deploy the virtual machines in a single Availability Set within the primary region.
  3. Deploy the virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones in the primary region.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy the virtual machines as Spot VMs across two or more Availability Zones.

Answer

Deploy the virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones in the primary region.
Deploying virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones provides a 99.99%99.99\% uptime SLA and protects the application from datacenter-level power and cooling failures by isolating instances in physically separate datacenters.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the service availability requirements.
The target workload requires an uptime SLA of 99.99%99.99\% and must survive datacenter-level utility power outages.
This establishes the minimum infrastructure resilience level.
2
Evaluate the SLA and isolation boundaries of each Azure VM configuration option.
Single VMs offer 99.9%99.9\%, Availability Sets offer 99.95%99.95\% inside a single datacenter, and Availability Zones offer 99.99%99.99\% across physically isolated datacenters.
This identifies which Azure compute option satisfies both the 99.99%99.99\% SLA and the datacenter-level outage requirement.
3
Select the option that meets the requirements while ensuring steady-state production support.
Deploying standard virtual machines across two or more Availability Zones satisfies all requirements, while Spot VMs must be ruled out because they lack an SLA and are subject to immediate eviction.
This ensures the selected solution is viable for a production environment.

Key Concept

Azure Compute High Availability SLA and Redundancy Options
Estimated Time:1m 30s
Rate this question