You must deploy a critical line-of-business application on a virtual machine in Azure with a required SLA of 99.99% availability, using as few virtual machines and availability zones as possible. Solution: Use one virtual machine across two availability zones. Does this solution meet the goal?

This solution does not meet the goal. While using two availability zones provides resilience against datacenter-level failures, deploying only one virtual machine (VM) across them is not possible. A single VM resides in one specific availability zone. To achieve 99.99% availability, you would need at least two VMs, each in a separate availability zone, configured with an Azure Load Balancer or Application Gateway to distribute traffic and handle failover. A single VM, even within an availability zone, only offers an SLA of 99.9% (if premium storage is used) or 99.5% (if standard storage is used).