AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a mission-critical multi-tier application on Azure VMs in West US. The application consists of database VMs, application VMs, and web VMs. During a disaster, the VMs must be recovered in a specific order: database tier first, then application tier, then web tier. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 minutes and recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes. The company wants to periodically test the recovery process without impacting production. After failover to East US, the VMs must retain their private IP addresses to avoid DNS propagation delays. Which combination of Azure Site Recovery features should they configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse network mapping (which only maps source to target networks) with static IP address assignment (which preserves the exact private IP), leading them to choose Option B instead of C.
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
✓
A recovery plan, test failover, and static IP address assignment
A recovery plan enforces the required startup order (database → application → web), test failover allows non-disruptive validation of the recovery process, and static IP address assignment ensures VMs retain their private IP addresses after failover to East US, avoiding DNS propagation delays. This combination meets the RPO of 5 minutes and RTO of 15 minutes while satisfying the requirement for periodic testing 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.
- ✗
A recovery plan, planned failover, and network mapping
Why it's wrong here
Planned failover is only appropriate for expected outages and maintenance windows—it gracefully shuts down source VMs to prevent data loss, making it unsuitable for regular recovery testing. Network mapping in Azure Site Recovery merely establishes the logical connectivity between source and target virtual networks; it does not preserve IP addresses. Without explicitly assigning static IPs to replicated VM instances, a failover can result in the VMs receiving a new, dynamically assigned IP from the target subnet, breaking IP-dependent connections.
- ✗
A recovery plan, test failover, and network mapping
Why it's wrong here
Test failover correctly provides a safe, isolated environment for validating the recovery plan without disrupting production workloads, but network mapping alone is insufficient for IP continuity. Network mapping links the source and target vNets and subnets for routing purposes, yet it leaves the target IP address to be dynamically assigned unless you configure a static IP on the NIC settings of each protected machine. Omitting static IP assignment means the failed-over VMs might come up with a different IP address than they had in the source network, which can break client connections and internal dependencies.
- ✓
A recovery plan, test failover, and static IP address assignment
Why this is correct
Recovery Plan defines the order of VM group failover and can incorporate Automation runbooks for post-failover customizations, such as updating DNS records. Test failover enables you to validate the entire recovery flow in an isolated test network safely, without any impact to the production source VMs. By explicitly assigning a static IP address to each VM in the target subnet, you guarantee the same IP is used after failover, which is crucial for applications with hard-coded IP dependencies. This combination fully meets the requirement: orchestrated, tested, and IP-preserving failover.
- ✗
A recovery plan, planned failover, and static IP address assignment
Why it's wrong here
Including a recovery plan and static IP assignment addresses orchestration and IP retention, but planned failover is the wrong mechanism for testing. Planned failover is designed for deliberate, expected migrations or maintenance, and it powers down the source VMs during the failover to synchronize delta changes, which can impact production availability. It does not offer the non-disruptive, isolated validation environment that test failover provides. To safely verify the mission-critical application's recovery, you need test failover, which spins up an isolated copy without shutting down the source.
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
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.
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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.