AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs in the West US region. They need to protect against a regional disaster using Azure Site Recovery. The VMs use unmanaged disks. The recovery point objective (RPO) must be 15 minutes and the recovery time objective (RTO) must be 1 hour. Additionally, they must be able to perform quarterly disaster recovery drills that do not affect the production environment. Which configuration should they use in Azure Site Recovery?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Backup (long-term backup) with Azure Site Recovery (replication for disaster recovery), as both can restore VMs but only Site Recovery supports low RPOs and non-disruptive test failovers.
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
✓
Set up replication with a 15-minute snapshot frequency and perform test failover for drills.
Azure Site Recovery supports replication of Azure VMs with unmanaged disks, and a 15-minute snapshot frequency meets the RPO requirement. Test failover allows quarterly disaster recovery drills without impacting the production environment, as it creates isolated copies of VMs in a separate network for validation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Set up replication with a 15-minute snapshot frequency and perform test failover for drills.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery's replication policy allows configuring a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes by setting the snapshot frequency, so you can cap data loss at 15 minutes. The built-in test failover feature launches your replicated VMs in an isolated Azure network, letting you run non-disruptive failover drills without affecting production or incurring downtime. This is the only option that directly delivers both the required RPO and a documented, low-risk drill methodology.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup for VM replication and perform restore drills.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a backup service that creates point-in-time recovery points, typically with a maximum frequency of daily (or up to four times a day for newer policies), and it does not offer continuous replication or a configurable snapshot frequency like 15 minutes. Restore drills validate that you can recover data, but they do not test failover orchestration, networking isolation, or runbook behavior—key elements of a disaster-recovery drill. Its purpose is data protection against corruption or deletion, not site-level failover.
- ✗
Configure a recovery plan with a pre-script to take a snapshot every 15 minutes.
Why it's wrong here
Recovery plans in Azure Site Recovery only orchestrate failover sequences—such as boot order and pre/post-scripts—during an actual failover or test failover, not ongoing replication. Snapshot frequency is a property of the replication policy attached to the protected VM, and you cannot change it via a script. A pre-script running every 15 minutes would need a separate scheduler and cannot influence ASR's own replication snapshots, so this approach does not meet the RPO and misuses recovery plan functionality.
- ✗
Enable multi-VM consistency group with a 15-minute consistency frequency.
Why it's wrong here
While a multi-VM consistency group can ensure crash-consistent or app-consistent recovery points across several VMs at the same time, it is unnecessary for a single critical VM and does not alter the basic snapshot frequency capability of ASR. Setting a consistency frequency of 15 minutes groups writes for cross-VM consistency, but it does not implement test failover drills—that requires the separate Test Failover action on the recovery plan or protection group. Thus, this option misses the drill requirement and adds complexity not needed for one VM.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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.
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.
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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.