AZ-104: Compute
Compute is one of the skill areas tested on the Azure Administrator (AZ-104) exam. Below are free AZ-104 practice questions with worked answers and a concept diagram — each with a plain-language explanation. Practice the first 10 questions of AZ-104 free, no signup.
The concept, in one picture
2 free AZ-104 Compute questions
You need to provision an Ubuntu Server virtual machine in your Azure subscription. As part of a customized deployment, the VM must be configured during provisioning to add a specific trusted root certification authority (CA) certificate. Which tool should you use to create the VM so that this configuration is applied at deployment time?
- ✓ The az vm create command with cloud-init supplied via --custom-data
- The legacy New-AzureRmVM cmdlet
- The Create-AzVM cmdlet
- A generalized managed image with no post-provisioning configuration
az vm create accepts a cloud-init configuration through the --custom-data parameter, which Ubuntu processes on first boot to run customization such as importing a trusted root CA certificate — exactly the customized deployment described. New-AzureRmVM belongs to the retired AzureRM module and should not be used for new work. Create-AzVM is not a real cmdlet (the Azure PowerShell verb is New-AzVM). A generalized managed image only clones a captured state and cannot inject per-deployment cloud-init configuration.
You are authoring an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template that deploys several virtual machines into a single availability set. To minimize the number of VMs that become unavailable during a physical hardware (fabric) failure or planned host maintenance, how should you set the availability set's platformFaultDomainCount property?
- ✓ To the maximum number of fault domains supported in the target region
- To the minimum value of 1
- To a fixed literal value of 10
- To a fixed literal value of 20
A fault domain is a group of hardware (rack, power, and network) that shares a single point of failure, and platformFaultDomainCount controls how many fault domains an availability set spreads its VMs across. Setting it to the maximum the region supports (2 or 3, depending on region) distributes the VMs across the most independent failure boundaries, so the fewest VMs are affected by a hardware fault or host update. A value of 1 packs every VM into one fault domain, defeating the purpose; literals like 10 or 20 exceed the fault-domain maximum (20 is the cap for update domains, not fault domains) and the deployment would fail.
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