AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for a critical application that runs on Azure VMs in a single region. The RTO is 4 hours, and the RPO is 1 hour. The application uses Azure SQL Database. The company wants to minimize the cost of the disaster recovery solution while meeting the RTO and RPO. You need to recommend a solution. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Backup (long-term backup) with Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery replication), leading them to choose a backup-only solution that cannot meet the RTO/RPO for rapid failover.
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 Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs to a secondary region and Azure SQL Database geo-replication for the database.
Azure Site Recovery provides orchestrated replication and failover for Azure VMs, meeting the 4-hour RTO with automated recovery plans. Azure SQL Database active geo-replication (or failover groups) enables continuous data synchronization with an RPO of 1 hour. This combination minimizes cost by using only the necessary replication services without over-provisioning resources.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure SQL Database active geo-replication for the database and Azure Backup for VMs.
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication is intended for read-scale scenarios: it maintains a readable secondary replica but lacks automatic failover, requiring manual promotion and application-level monitoring to redirect connections. Azure Backup for VMs, meanwhile, takes scheduled snapshots at daily or coarser intervals with a default RPO around 24 hours, not continuous replication. Together they do not provide the low RPO or automated failover needed for disaster recovery.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup to back up VMs and Azure SQL Database to a secondary region.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup copies virtual machines and Azure SQL Database to a Recovery Services vault, which may be geo-redundant, but those are point-in-time backups, not live replicas. The default backup frequency for VMs is 24 hours, and even SQL backups are snapshots rather than continuously applied transaction log replication. That yields an RPO far higher than the required 1-hour objective and requires full restore before the workload is usable, both of which fail the stated DR requirements.
- ✗
Use Azure Traffic Manager to distribute traffic to VMs in multiple regions and Azure SQL Database failover groups.
Why it's wrong here
Traffic Manager is a DNS-based load balancer that routes traffic only to endpoints that already exist and are healthy; it does not provision, replicate, or cold-start VMs in a secondary region. While SQL Database failover groups handle the database tier, the VM tier has no presence in the secondary region, so redirected traffic would have no compute resource to serve it. The solution therefore addresses availability but not the actual replication of compute, missing the RPO and RTO targets.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs to a secondary region and Azure SQL Database geo-replication for the database.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates managed disks of Azure VMs to the paired region with an RPO typically measured in seconds to a few minutes, and it supports automated, testable failover, so the compute tier comfortably meets the 1-hour RPO. Azure SQL Database geo-replication (or failover groups) asynchronously replays committed transactions to a secondary database, providing an RPO of seconds and enabling simple failover for the data tier. This combination covers both compute and data with continuous replication rather than backup or traffic routing, making it the correct DR architecture.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Identity Solutions
Key term
BIA and RPO RTO Design
Business Impact Analysis and the design of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective define how much data loss and downtime a business can tolerate after an IT failure, guiding the architecture of backup and disaster recovery systems.
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-305 exam.