Virtual Machines, Disks, Scale and Availability
VM questions test VM creation, encryption at host, moves, sizes, disks, availability zones, availability sets, scale sets, and capacity planning.
How to study for AZ-104
Treat each AZ-104 item as an admin workflow: identify the scope, resource type, access boundary, deployment method, monitoring signal, or recovery requirement.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Virtual Machines, Disks, Scale and Availability questions reward operational Azure administration judgment rather than simple service-name recall.
Exam cue: Identify the Azure scope: tenant, management group, subscription, resource group, resource, subnet, or identity.
Concept 2
The best answer identifies the scope, resource type, access path, deployment method, monitoring signal, and recovery requirement.
Exam cue: Match the tool to the administrative task: manage access, deploy, secure, monitor, back up, or troubleshoot.
Concept 3
Eliminate answers that confuse RBAC with policy, public access with private access, monitoring with backup, or templates with manual changes.
Exam cue: Prefer least privilege, repeatable deployment, protected storage, private networking, and validated recovery.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Using Azure Policy when the question asks who is allowed to perform an action.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that confuse RBAC with Policy, tags with network controls, dashboards with backup, or public exposure with secure private access.
Opening public access when private endpoints, service endpoints, or NSGs meet the requirement.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that confuse RBAC with Policy, tags with network controls, dashboards with backup, or public exposure with secure private access.
Assuming backup exists before checking vault, policy, retention, and restore validation.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that confuse RBAC with Policy, tags with network controls, dashboards with backup, or public exposure with secure private access.
Memory anchors
Virtual Machine
An Azure virtual machine provides IaaS compute with customer operating system control.
Encryption At Host
Encryption at host encrypts VM data at the host level before it reaches storage.
VM Size
VM size determines CPU, memory, storage, and network capabilities.
Managed Disk
A managed disk provides block storage for Azure virtual machines.
Availability Zone
An availability zone places resources in physically separate datacenter locations in a region.
Availability Set
An availability set spreads VMs across fault and update domains.
Scale Set
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets deploy and manage groups of load-balanced VMs.
Fault Domain
A fault domain groups resources sharing physical infrastructure.
Update Domain
An update domain groups resources that may be rebooted together during maintenance.
VM Move
Moving a VM can involve resource group, subscription, region, disk, and dependency constraints.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
A Linux VM must allow administrators to sign in without distributing a reusable password. Which authentication choice is preferred at creation?
A Windows VM needs a larger size that is not shown while the VM is running. What should the administrator try first?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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