AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Azure VMs in the West US region. They want to protect against a regional disaster by replicating VMs to East US using Azure Site Recovery. They have both managed and unmanaged disks. They need to ensure that after failover, the recovery VMs are automatically placed in a specific availability set to support the application's multi-tier architecture. Additionally, they want to minimize downtime during planned failover. Which configuration should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse replication settings (like target availability set per VM) with recovery plans, not realizing that only recovery plans can enforce failover order and group-level placement, which is critical for multi-tier applications.
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
✓
Configure a recovery plan that includes the VMs and specifies the target availability set and failover order
A recovery plan in Azure Site Recovery allows you to group VMs, specify the target availability set, and define the failover order. This ensures that after failover, the recovery VMs are automatically placed in the specified availability set, supporting the application's multi-tier architecture. Additionally, recovery plans enable you to automate and sequence failover steps, minimizing downtime during planned failover by orchestrating the process efficiently.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure a recovery plan that includes the VMs and specifies the target availability set and failover order
Why this is correct
A recovery plan in Azure Site Recovery groups all VMs into a single orchestrated failover unit, letting you specify the target availability set in the secondary region and defining the exact failover order. You can add pre/post-action runbooks to automate scripted steps, which minimizes downtime and ensures application-consistent startup during planned failover. Setting availability sets and boot order individually in VM replication settings lacks this coordinated sequencing, so the recovery plan is the appropriate DR orchestration mechanism.
- ✗
Set the target availability set in each VM's replication settings individually without a recovery plan
Why it's wrong here
While you can configure target availability set per VM in replication settings, this does not provide the orchestration needed to ensure correct boot order or minimize downtime during planned failover. A recovery plan is more effective.
- ✗
Use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic to the secondary region after manual failover
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level and only routes incoming traffic to healthy endpoints; it does not perform VM replication, failover, or placement configuration such as target availability sets. While you could point Traffic Manager to the recovered VMs in the secondary region after failover, it has no awareness of failover sequencing, recovery point consistency, or boot order. The replication and failover behavior must be configured separately in Azure Site Recovery, so Traffic Manager alone cannot satisfy the stated requirement.
- ✗
Enable consistency groups across the VMs using a replication policy
Why it's wrong here
A replication policy with multi-VM consistency groups in Azure Site Recovery enables crash-consistent or app-consistent recovery points across a set of VMs by coordinating replication, but it does not control the target availability set or failover order in the recovery plan. The consistency group only ensures that all included VMs fail over to the same point in time, reducing data loss; it is a replication-level attribute, not an orchestration-level setting. Failover sequencing and target placement are configured in the recovery plan, not in the replication policy.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage 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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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