Question 393 of 1,013
High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design for Security+
An order-entry application must survive a single server failure and continue serving users if the primary site becomes unavailable. Management wants automatic failover, but does not want to pay for fully active production capacity in two regions. Which design is best?
Quick Answer
The best design is to use two servers in one site behind a load balancer and maintain an asynchronously replicated warm standby site. This configuration directly addresses the high availability and disaster recovery design requirements by providing automatic failover for a single server failure through the load-balanced pair, while the asynchronously replicated warm standby ensures continued service if the primary site becomes unavailable—all without the cost of fully active capacity in two regions. On the Security+ SY0-701 exam, this question tests your ability to balance availability against cost in a disaster recovery plan, often appearing as a scenario where you must choose between active-active, active-passive, and warm standby options. A common trap is selecting a fully active multi-region setup, which wastes resources, or a cold standby, which lacks automatic failover. Remember the mnemonic “LAMP” for this scenario: Load balancer, Active-passive pair, asynchronously Mirrored warm standby, and Primary site focus.
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high availability (local redundancy) with disaster recovery (site-level failover), and incorrectly assume that RAID or backups alone satisfy the requirement for automatic failover after a site outage.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use two servers in one site behind a load balancer and maintain an asynchronously replicated warm standby site.
It combines a load-balanced active-passive pair at the primary site with an asynchronously replicated warm standby at a secondary site. This design meets the requirement for automatic failover and continued service after a single server failure or primary site outage, while avoiding the cost of fully active multi-region capacity. Asynchronous replication ensures the standby site is ready to take over without requiring synchronous writes that would add latency or require identical production load.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Run one server and keep nightly backups in cloud object storage.
Why it's wrong here
Backups help recovery after loss, but they do not provide automatic service continuity during an outage.
- ✓
Use two servers in one site behind a load balancer and maintain an asynchronously replicated warm standby site.
Why this is correct
This provides local redundancy for server failure and a lower-cost secondary site for failover if the primary site is lost.
- ✗
Deploy active-active multi-region capacity with identical production load in both regions.
Why it's wrong here
Active-active meets the availability goal, but it usually costs more than the scenario allows and duplicates production capacity.
- ✗
Add RAID 1 and a spare power supply to the database server.
Why it's wrong here
These hardware controls improve a single server’s reliability, but they do not address a site outage or application-level failover.
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Same concept, more angles
6 more ways this is tested on SY0-701
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A customer portal must continue operating if one application server fails. The business wants a simple, cost-conscious design that improves availability. What is the best approach?
easy- ✓ A.Add a second application server behind a load balancer.
- B.Schedule nightly backups to a different storage account.
- C.Buy a larger server with more CPU and memory.
- D.Move the portal to a different subnet without changing the servers.
Why A: Adding a second application server behind a load balancer creates an active-passive or active-active cluster that provides redundancy. If one server fails, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the healthy server, ensuring continuous operation. This design is cost-conscious because it uses commodity servers rather than expensive vertical scaling, and it directly improves availability by eliminating the single point of failure.
Variation 2. A customer portal must keep operating if one application server fails and also remain available if an entire site goes offline. Management is willing to pay more for automatic failover and the shortest possible interruption. Which design is best?
medium- ✓ A.An active-active deployment across two sites with load balancing and replicated data.
- B.A cold site that restores from nightly backups after a failure.
- C.A single active site with one standby server in the same rack.
- D.RAID 1 on the database server with no additional redundancy.
Why A: An active-active deployment across two sites with load balancing and replicated data ensures continuous operation if one application server fails and also if an entire site goes offline. Load balancers distribute traffic to healthy servers, and synchronous data replication keeps both sites consistent, enabling automatic failover with minimal interruption. This design meets the requirement for the shortest possible interruption because failover is instantaneous and does not require manual intervention or data restoration.
Variation 3. A customer portal must keep operating if one application server fails. Management wants the simplest and lowest-cost design that still improves availability. What should the team implement?
medium- A.Add more backups and schedule them every hour.
- B.Use a second data center with synchronous replication and active-active clustering.
- ✓ C.Deploy a hot standby application server with automatic failover.
- D.Restart the failed server manually after the help desk is notified.
Why C: A hot standby (active/passive) application server with automatic failover provides the simplest and lowest-cost improvement to availability. It eliminates the single point of failure by having a standby server ready to take over if the primary fails, without requiring complex load balancing or synchronous replication. This design directly addresses the requirement of keeping the portal operational during a single server failure while minimizing cost and complexity.
Variation 4. A customer portal must stay online if one application server fails. Which two design choices improve availability? Select two.
easy- ✓ A.Use load balancing across multiple application servers.
- ✓ B.Add a redundant standby server or failover target.
- C.Store the application logs on a larger disk.
- D.Increase the password length requirement for portal users.
- E.Place all traffic on a single high-performance server.
Why A: Load balancing (A) distributes incoming traffic across multiple application servers; if one fails, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining healthy servers, eliminating a single point of failure. A redundant standby server (B) also improves availability by providing a failover target: if the primary server fails, the standby can take over, minimizing downtime. Both designs introduce redundancy, which is essential for high availability.
Variation 5. A customer portal must keep serving requests if one application server stops responding. The team wants traffic to be sent to whichever healthy server is available. Which design should they implement?
easy- ✓ A.A load balancer in front of multiple application servers
- B.A RAID 1 array in the application server
- C.A snapshot of the application server before each update
- D.A longer password policy for the portal administrators
Why A: A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple application servers and performs health checks (e.g., HTTP GET requests to a /health endpoint) to detect failures. If one server stops responding, the load balancer automatically routes requests only to the remaining healthy servers, ensuring continuous availability. This design directly meets the requirement for fault tolerance and active traffic distribution.
Variation 6. A customer portal must keep serving users if one application server fails and also remain available if the primary site becomes unreachable. Management prefers automatic recovery over manual intervention. Which two design choices best satisfy the goal? Select two.
medium- ✓ A.Deploy multiple application servers behind a load balancer across separate availability zones.
- B.Use a single high-end server with RAID 10 and a larger power supply.
- C.Keep only nightly backups and restore manually after an outage.
- D.Store the database on a local disk array attached to the primary server.
- ✓ E.Replicate the database to a standby site with automatic failover.
Why A: Deploying multiple application servers behind a load balancer across separate availability zones (A) provides redundancy at the application tier: if one server fails, traffic is automatically redirected to healthy servers. Replicating the database to a standby site with automatic failover (E) ensures that if the primary site becomes unreachable, the database can be promoted to active without manual intervention, meeting the requirement for automatic recovery.
Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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