AZ-305 Azure Site Recovery Practice Question
A company runs a critical line-of-business application on 10 Azure VMs. They need a disaster recovery solution that replicates the VMs to a secondary region with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 30 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The solution must support non-disruptive testing of failover for quarterly compliance drills. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Backup (which is for backup/restore with longer RPO) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and orchestrated failover), overlooking that the question explicitly requires non-disruptive test failovers and strict RPO/RTO, which only ASR can provide.
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
✓
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs to a secondary region, meeting the RPO of 30 minutes (continuous replication with 30-second RPO) and RTO of 1 hour (orchestrated recovery). It supports non-disruptive test failovers via isolated networks, which is essential for quarterly compliance drills without impacting production.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup captures periodic recovery points into a vault; restoring ten VMs to a secondary region takes hours, breaching the 1-hour RTO, and it cannot run non-disruptive failover tests. It is tempting because it protects data and supports cross-region restore, but that suits backup retention, not continuous replication.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery provides continuous asynchronous replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region, meeting the 30-minute RPO, and supports test failover into an isolated network for non-disruptive quarterly drills while delivering the 1-hour RTO.
- ✗
Azure Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate discovers, assesses, and migrates on-premises workloads to Azure; it does not continuously replicate running Azure VMs to a secondary region or perform test failovers. It is tempting because it handles VM movement between environments, but that is migration planning, not ongoing disaster recovery with a 30-minute RPO.
- ✗
Manual VM replication to secondary region
Why it's wrong here
Manual replication cannot meet a 30-minute RPO or 1-hour RTO, and provides no isolated failover testing. It is tempting as a free, script-driven approach for simple lift-and-shift migrations where downtime is acceptable, but quarterly non-disruptive drills require orchestrated test failover that only Azure Site Recovery delivers.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Policy as Code and Compliance Automation
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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JA
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.