Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator AssociateImplement and manage hybrid identitiesEasy
A company has successfully deployed Azure AD Connect with Pass-through Authentication (PTA) to synchronize identities. They want to ensure high availability for the authentication service in case one of the PTA agents becomes unavailable. What is the minimum recommended number of Pass-through Authentication agents that should be deployed in the on-premises environment to achieve high availability?
- AThree agents
- BFour agents
- COne agent
- DTwo agents
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Two agents
For high availability with Pass-through Authentication, it is recommended to deploy at least two authentication agents. This ensures that if one agent becomes unavailable, the other can continue to process authentication requests, preventing service disruption.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Three agents provide even greater redundancy but two is the minimum recommendation for high availability.
- B. Four agents provide significant redundancy but are not the minimum recommended for basic high availability.
- C. One agent provides no redundancy and is a single point of failure.
PTA High Availability
To ensure continuous authentication service with Azure AD Pass-through Authentication, multiple authentication agents should be deployed on-premises to provide redundancy.
- Minimum of two agents for high availability.
- Agents are stateless and can be added/removed easily.
- Azure AD automatically load-balances requests across available agents.
Memory trick: Two is the magic number for a pair of agents to share the load.