AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company deploys a multi-tier application on Azure virtual machines. They need to implement disaster recovery using Azure Site Recovery. The recovery plan must ensure that the database VMs are started before the application VMs, and the application VMs before the web VMs. They also need to run a script after failover to update DNS records. Which ASR feature should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse a standalone Azure Automation runbook (which can run scripts but cannot enforce VM startup order) with a script action embedded in a Recovery Plan (which combines both ordering and script execution).
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
✓
Recovery Plan with custom groups and script actions
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Recovery Plans allow you to orchestrate the order of VM failover by grouping VMs into custom groups and adding pre- and post-actions. By placing database VMs in Group 1, application VMs in Group 2, and web VMs in Group 3, you enforce the required startup sequence. Script actions (e.g., Azure Automation runbooks or PowerShell scripts) can be inserted at specific points in the plan to update DNS records after failover, making option B the correct choice.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Recovery Plan with manual steps
Why it's wrong here
Manual actions in an Azure Site Recovery recovery plan are pause points that require an operator to acknowledge and perform steps outside of Azure before failover can continue. They do not enforce VM startup sequencing or launch automated tasks, so a human must manually start each tier in the correct order. Because the requirement is for an automated multi-tier recovery, a recovery plan based on manual steps fails to meet it and introduces risk of delay or error.
- ✓
Recovery Plan with custom groups and script actions
Why this is correct
Custom groups in an Azure Site Recovery recovery plan provide strict ordering by letting you assign VMs to sequential groups; the plan starts each group only after the previous group completes. Script actions, implemented as Azure Automation runbooks or PowerShell commands, can be attached to each group to run post-failover steps such as waiting for the database tier to be ready or updating application configuration. This combination gives you automated, deterministic tier-by-tier startup without human intervention.
- ✗
Replication policy with crash-consistent snapshots
Why it's wrong here
A replication policy in Azure Site Recovery controls how often recovery points are created and whether they are crash-consistent or app-consistent; it is concerned with the point-in-time state of data, not with operational orchestration. Crash-consistent snapshots simply replicate the disk state as if power were lost, so they do not contain application-consistent writes and cannot define the order in which VMs start after failover. The policy has no scripting or group-ordering capability, making it irrelevant to the multi-tier startup requirement.
- ✗
Azure Automation runbook
Why it's wrong here
An Azure Automation runbook is a general-purpose automation script that can perform actions like starting a VM or updating a load balancer, but it has no native knowledge of VM startup ordering across tiers; it would need to be manually invoked, scheduled, or wired into a recovery plan. Even if a runbook contains logic to start VMs sequentially, it lacks the recovery plan's built-in group sequencing, health checks, and rollback capabilities. Runbooks become effective only when used as script actions inside a recovery plan, so a standalone runbook is not sufficient.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Relational Database Solutions
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
Key term
Disaster Recovery Design
Disaster Recovery Design is the process of planning and implementing strategies to restore IT systems and data after a catastrophic failure, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime and data loss.
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