You're deploying a critical line-of-business application to Azure on virtual machines. The deployment must guarantee 99.99% availability while using as few virtual machines and availability zones as possible. Solution: Use two virtual machines across two availability zones. Does this solution meet the requirement?

Yes, this solution meets the requirement. Deploying two virtual machines across two availability zones provides a 99.99% uptime SLA for the VMs themselves. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking, protecting against datacenter-level failures. Using two VMs across two zones is the minimum configuration to achieve this SLA with Availability Zones, as a single VM has a lower SLA, and using more VMs or zones than necessary would increase cost without further improving the SLA beyond 99.99% for the VMs.