AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a multi-tier application on Azure VMs in the West US region. The application has web, application, and database tiers. They want to use Azure Site Recovery for disaster recovery to East US. They need to ensure that after failover, the web tier starts first, then the application tier, and finally the database tier after a consistency check. They also need to be able to perform non-disruptive DR drills. Which Azure Site Recovery capabilities should they use together?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup's restore capabilities with ASR's orchestrated failover, or assume that availability sets or Traffic Manager can control startup sequencing, when only ASR recovery plans with custom groups and scripts provide the required ordered startup and non-disruptive DR drill functionality.
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
✓
Create a recovery plan with custom groups and scripts for startup order, and use test failover for DR drills
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) recovery plans allow you to define custom groups and scripts to control the startup order of VMs after failover. By placing the web, application, and database tiers into separate groups with pre- and post-actions (e.g., PowerShell scripts), you can ensure the web tier starts first, then the application tier, and finally the database tier after a consistency check. ASR's test failover capability performs a non-disruptive DR drill by creating isolated copies of VMs in a separate VNet without impacting the production environment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create a recovery plan with custom groups and scripts for startup order, and use test failover for DR drills
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery recovery plans are the intended orchestration mechanism for multi-tier DR: you can define custom groups for application tiers and insert pre/post scripts (PowerShell or Azure Automation runbooks) so that VMs start in dependency order (e.g., database before web). Test failover executes these plans in an isolated test VNet with cloned recovery points, providing a non-disruptive, repeatable drill that validates the entire startup sequence without touching production.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup for the VMs and restore them in order after failover
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup creates scheduled, point-in-time snapshots (typically once or twice a day with a 24-hour RPO) and does not provide continuous replication or an orchestrated failover workflow. Restoring VMs manually after a region outage not only breaks application startup dependencies but also exposes the recovery to stale data; a full DR drill would require restoring into a separate environment and is inherently disruptive to production if done in place.
- ✗
Use an availability set to control startup order and use disaster recovery drills in a separate VNet
Why it's wrong here
An availability set controls placement of VM instances across fault domains and update domains within a single Azure datacenter to protect against rack failures and maintenance, not to order startup sequences. It has no role in cross-region replication or failover orchestration, and a DR drill in a separate VNet would still require creating and manually starting new VMs because availability sets do not contain any mechanism for copying data or executing application boot order.
- ✗
Use Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic after failover and manually start VMs in order
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based global load balancer that forwards clients to healthy endpoints based on routing methods (priority, weighted, performance), but it does not start, stop, or sequence VMs and it cannot invoke scripts to boot tiers in order. Manually starting VMs after failover introduces human error and misses the automation requirement; Traffic Manager alone cannot guarantee a coordinated multi-tier recovery, and it would only handle one part of the traffic-routing problem.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Non-Relational Database 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
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.