Mark works as the Cloud Architecture Instructor at MDFT Pro, an Azure training organization specializing in scalable infrastructure solutions. He’s conducting an advanced workshop on Virtual Machine Scale Sets for their AZ-104 Azure Administrator certification program. MDFT Pro has deployed Scale1, a virtual machine scale set, as part of their hands-on training environment to demonstrate autoscaling concepts to students.
Claire, the Performance Monitoring Specialist, has configured Scale1 with specific autoscaling rules to simulate real-world application scaling scenarios. The scale set is designed to handle variable workloads typical of modern web applications, where traffic patterns can fluctuate significantly throughout the day. During a practical exercise, students are observing the autoscaling behavior as the training application experiences sustained high CPU utilization of 85% for six minutes, which exceeds the configured scale-out threshold.
This scenario helps students understand how Azure automatically responds to performance metrics and adjusts compute capacity to maintain application performance while optimizing costs.
Scale1 is configured with the following settings:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Instance Configuration | |
| Instance count | 4 |
| Instance size | DS1_v2 |
| Deploy as low priority | No |
| Use managed disks | Yes |
| Autoscale Configuration | |
| Autoscale | Enabled |
| Minimum number of VMs | 2 |
| Maximum number of VMs | 20 |
| Scale Out Rules | |
| CPU threshold | 80% |
| Number of VMs to increase by | 2 |
| Scale In Rules | |
| CPU threshold | 30% |
| Number of VMs to decrease by | 4 |
If Scale1 is utilized at 85% CPU for six minutes, how many virtual machines will Scale1 be running?
Choose the correct answer from the options below.
Explanations for each answer: