GregLab | Exam Prep

Compute resilience

Core

Availability sets

Fault-domain and update-domain placement for VMs.

Key points

  • Spread member VMs across fault domains and update domains.
  • Provide datacenter-level placement protection rather than zone-level separation.
  • Require multiple application instances to produce meaningful redundancy.

Best-known use cases

  • Protect paired VMs from a single rack or maintenance-domain event.
  • Add placement resilience in a nonzonal design.

What candidates often confuse it with

  • Availability set vs zone: fault/update-domain placement vs separate datacenter zones.
  • Availability set vs scale set: placement grouping vs fleet orchestration and scaling.

Key takeaway

Use an availability set for multiple VMs that need fault and update-domain separation without a zonal design.

Related services

  • Azure Availability Zones
  • Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Relevant exam tasks

  • D3.2.S6 — Deploy virtual machines to availability zones and availability sets
  • D3.2.S7 — Deploy and configure an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

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Exam Weights

Exam snapshot

AZ-104 at a glance

Level
Intermediate
Duration
100 minutes
Questions
No fixed live question count published
Formats
No guaranteed question-type mix
Scoring
1–1,000 scaled score; 700 minimum passing score

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Mode

Exam fidelity: Microsoft does not publish a fixed live question count or guarantee a question-type mix for AZ-104. This lane counts multiple-choice and multiple-response items as exam-style practice. Ordering, matching, and case-study items are supplemental site exercises and do not count toward exam-style accuracy. Practice percentages do not reproduce Microsoft's scaled scoring, and difficulty labels describe this site's Intermediate-level scenario complexity rather than a Microsoft-published question rating.

Reference

AZ-104 topics and reference map

Study links

AZ-104 resources

Official Microsoft resources

AZ-104 official study guide

The live Microsoft guide with the skills-measured date, domain ranges, and detailed objectives.

Azure Administrator Associate certification

Official certification overview, assessment duration, practice assessment, exam sandbox, and scheduling path.

AZ-104T00 Microsoft Azure Administrator course

Official instructor-led course and training path for Azure administrators preparing for AZ-104.