Five Windows Server 2016 Azure VMs are acting as web servers behind an Azure load balancer (LB1). How do you ensure each visitor is routed to the same web server for all requests?

The correct answer is Set Session persistence to Client IP. Session persistence (also known as sticky sessions or affinity) ensures that requests from a specific client IP address are always directed to the same backend server. This is crucial for applications that maintain session state on the server, preventing data loss or unexpected behavior when a user's subsequent requests are routed to a different server. Setting Floating IP (direct server return) to Disabled is the default and generally recommended for Azure Load Balancer, but it doesn't address session persistence. Idle Time-out (minutes) configures how long a TCP or HTTP connection can remain inactive before being closed, which is unrelated to routing clients to specific servers. Creating a health probe is essential for the load balancer to monitor the health of backend instances and remove unhealthy ones from rotation, but it does not manage session affinity.