You will deploy three VMs (VM1, VM2, VM3) to host a web app and must ensure at least two VMs remain available if a single Azure datacenter becomes unavailable. How should you distribute the virtual machines?

Distributing each virtual machine into a separate Availability Zone ensures high availability against datacenter-level failures. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. If one datacenter (Availability Zone) goes offline, the other two VMs in different zones remain operational, meeting the requirement of at least two VMs being available. Placing all three VMs in a single Availability Zone would make them all vulnerable to a failure in that specific zone. A single Availability Set protects against hardware failures within a datacenter (like rack or host failures) but not against a complete datacenter outage. Placing each VM in a separate Availability Set within the same Availability Zone still leaves them susceptible to a single datacenter failure.