AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a mission-critical application on Azure VMs in West US. They need a disaster recovery plan with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 30 minutes. The application consists of multiple VMs that must be recovered in a specific order: the database VM first, then the front-end VMs. They also need to ensure that after failover, the IP addresses of the VMs are retained to avoid DNS propagation delays. The company wants to test the recovery process periodically without affecting production. Which Azure Site Recovery features should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Azure Traffic Manager (a DNS-based traffic routing service) with Site Recovery's built-in IP retention capabilities, or they assume that 'retention IP' is a standalone feature rather than a configuration within failover network settings.
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 recovery plans with virtual machine group ordering and failover network settings to assign static IPs.
Azure Site Recovery recovery plans allow you to define the order of VM recovery using groups, and you can assign static IP addresses via failover network settings to retain IPs after failover. This meets the RPO of 5 minutes (via continuous replication) and RTO of 30 minutes (via orchestrated failover), while test failover can be performed 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.
- ✓
Use recovery plans with virtual machine group ordering and failover network settings to assign static IPs.
Why this is correct
Recovery plans allow you to create groups of VMs and specify the order of failover. Failover network settings enable you to assign static IP addresses to the recovered VMs. Test failover is supported for drills.
- ✗
Use failover settings with retention IP and test failover.
Why it's wrong here
Configuring failover settings to retain IP addresses and running a test failover validates basic replication, but these options do not control the boot order of tiers. Site Recovery alone cannot sequence a multi-tier application without a recovery plan's VM group ordering; failover settings lack the orchestration to ensure the database tier starts before the web tier. Thus, a real failover could leave broken dependencies even though the test succeeded.
- ✗
Use recovery plans with custom scripts for ordering and Azure Traffic Manager for IP retention.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager routes public DNS traffic to different endpoints, but it does not retain the private IP addresses of the VMs themselves, which is a specific requirement to avoid internal DNS propagation delays in this scenario. While recovery plans with custom scripts correctly handle ordering, Traffic Manager is designed for global traffic distribution and public DNS-based failover across regions. It would be appropriate if the primary goal was to direct users to a healthy public endpoint, rather than preserving the VMs' internal IP configurations.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery with Application Consistent Snapshots and ignore IP retention.
Why it's wrong here
Application-consistent snapshots improve RPO by ensuring VMs fail over to a VSS-consistent point, but they do not address startup ordering or network address continuity. Deliberately ignoring IP retention forces recovered VMs to obtain new IPs, which means internal clients holding old DNS entries continue to send traffic to unreachable addresses until caches expire. Since the company's requirement is to avoid DNS propagation delay, this approach fails by design.
Go deeper
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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.