Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

Which feature allows you to create and manage a group of identical, load balanced VMs?

1. VM scale sets

2. Load Balancers

3. Availability Sets

4. Performance Scalers

The correct answer is: VM scale sets

The feature that allows you to create and manage a group of identical, load-balanced virtual machines is known as VM scale sets. This service is designed for scenarios where you need to deploy a large number of VMs that can automatically scale based on demand, ensuring high availability and performance. VM scale sets enable you to manage the lifecycle of these identical VMs collectively. They support automatic scaling, which means that as the load increases, more VMs can be added to handle the demand, and conversely, VMs can be removed during periods of low load. This makes VM scale sets particularly useful for applications that experience variable workloads and need to remain responsive and efficient. In contrast, while load balancers can distribute incoming network traffic across multiple VMs to ensure no single VM is overwhelmed, they do not manage the creation of those VMs. Similarly, availability sets focus on providing high availability and redundancy for VMs placed in an environment to protect against hardware failures but do not involve the auto-scaling feature inherent in VM scale sets. Performance scalers are not a recognized feature in Azure's context for VM management. Therefore, VM scale sets are the most appropriate choice for creating and managing identical, load-balanced VMs.