Ensuring Azure Environment Compliance with Regulatory Requirements

Evaluate Azure Environment for Regulatory Compliance

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Question

Note: This question is part of a series of questions that present the same scenario. Each question in the series contains a unique solution that might meet the stated goals. Some question sets might have more than one correct solution, while others might not have a correct solution.

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You plan to deploy several Azure virtual machines.

You need to ensure that the services running on the virtual machines are available if a single data center fails.

Solution: You deploy the virtual machines to two or more availability zones.

Does this meet the goal?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B.

A

Availability zones expand the level of control you have to maintain the availability of the applications and data on your VMs. An Availability Zone is a physically separate zone, within an Azure region. There are three Availability Zones per supported Azure region.

Each Availability Zone has a distinct power source, network, and cooling. By architecting your solutions to use replicated VMs in zones, you can protect your apps and data from the loss of a datacenter. If one zone is compromised, then replicated apps and data are instantly available in another zone.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/availability

An Azure Storage account that uses geo-redundant storage (GRS) provides redundancy for data in case of a regional outage. With GRS, data is stored in both the primary region and a secondary region, which is at least 400 miles away from the primary region.

The data in the primary region is replicated synchronously to three copies, whereas the data in the secondary region is replicated asynchronously to three more copies. This means that a total of six copies of data are maintained by an Azure Storage account that uses GRS, which provides high durability and availability for your data.

Therefore, the correct answer to the question is C. 6.

The proposed solution of deploying the virtual machines to two or more availability zones does meet the stated goal of ensuring that the services running on the virtual machines are available if a single data center fails.

An availability zone is a logically isolated data center within an Azure region, which is designed to be resilient to failures. Each availability zone has its own power source, network, and cooling, and is physically separate from other zones within the same region. This means that if one availability zone experiences an outage or failure, the other availability zones should remain unaffected.

By deploying virtual machines to two or more availability zones, you are essentially distributing your workload across multiple physical locations within the same region. This provides a high level of fault tolerance, since even if one availability zone goes down, the virtual machines in the other availability zones should remain operational and accessible.

In contrast, if you were to deploy virtual machines to a single data center within a region, you would be exposing yourself to a single point of failure. If that data center experiences an outage, all of the virtual machines deployed there would be affected and unavailable.

Therefore, the proposed solution of deploying virtual machines to two or more availability zones is a good way to ensure high availability and resiliency for your services in Azure.