Quick Note — Recommend a Virtual Machine-Based Solution
AZ-305 › Unit 4: Design infrastructure solutions › Design compute solutions › Recommend a virtual machine-based solution
Quick Note — Recommend a Virtual Machine-Based Solution
A trading firm migrates a latency-sensitive analytics workload to Azure. The on-prem cluster ran on bare-metal servers with 30-microsecond inter-node latency. The Azure team picks Standard_D8s_v5 VMs (general-purpose, sounds right), deploys them across availability zones (sounds responsible), and watches the workload's 99th-percentile latency triple. The fix turns out to be three changes: switch to an Ebsv5 storage-throughput-optimised family, deploy into a Proximity Placement Group, and pin all VMs to the same Accelerated-Networking-enabled SKU. The team made a generic decision when a specific one was required.…
Retrieval target
- Recommend a Virtual Machine-Based Solution
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
| VM size families at a glance | B — burstable; banks CPU credits when idle and spends them in bursts. Cheap dev/test, low-traffic web. D / Ds (v5) — general-purpose; balanced CPU:RAM. Default workhorse. E / Es — memory-optimised; high RAM-per-vCore for in-memory DBs, caches. F / Fs — compute-optimised; high CPU-per-RAM for CPU-bound web tier. M — huge memory (2–24 TB); SAP HANA.… |
Spot VM | A VM that runs on unused Azure capacity at a discount up to ~90%, with the catch that Microsoft can evict the VM with 30 seconds' notice if the capacity is reclaimed. Set a max price; if spot price exceeds it, the VM is evicted. Pick for interruptible workloads — batch processing, video transcoding, rendering, dev/test, fuzzing. Avoid for any service that can't tolerate sudden termination. |
Dedicated Host | A physical server reserved entirely for you — no other tenants. You provision VMs onto it, get host-level visibility (hardware generation, CPU model), and control OS-update timing. Use for compliance / licensing scenarios that forbid co-tenancy (BYOL with strict licensing) or workloads needing predictable performance without noisy neighbors. Premium price — you pay for the whole host, not per-VM. |
Gen 2 VM | VMs using UEFI firmware (vs Gen 1's BIOS). Required for Trusted Launch (secure boot, vTPM, virtualisation-based security), larger OS disks ( TB), and faster boot. Default for new sizes (Dv5 / Esv5 onwards). Some legacy images / drivers don't support Gen 2 — check before lift-and-shift. Gen choice is set at VM create time and not changeable later. |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.