A cloud administrator is tasked with ensuring redundancy and high availability of an IaaS cloud platform environment. The administrator is given the following requirements: Two web servers must…

Round-robin DNS with a CNAME record rotates DNS responses across the IP addresses of both web servers, distributing client connections evenly while both servers maintain identical configurations. This satisfies the requirement for balanced load sharing across two uniformly configured web servers without requiring dedicated load balancer hardware.

A load balancer with a virtual IP also distributes traffic evenly but introduces additional infrastructure complexity beyond what round-robin DNS provides for this scenario, and the exam selects A as the correct web server solution.

An active-active cluster has both database nodes simultaneously processing client requests, which violates the stated requirement that only one database server is in use at a time.

An active-passive database cluster keeps one node actively handling all read/write operations while the second node remains synchronized but idle, taking over only upon primary node failure. This directly satisfies the requirement that only one database server is used at a time while still providing data redundancy and high availability.

Availability mechanisms such as DNS-based distribution and VM clustering are standard features of IaaS cloud platforms and do exist, making this claim factually incorrect.

Redundancy features including VM replication and clustered storage are standard IaaS offerings that do exist on the platform, making this claim factually incorrect.