AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a multi-tier application on Azure VMs. The application has front-end and back-end VMs that must be started in a specific order during failover (front-end first, then back-end). The company uses Azure Site Recovery to replicate to a secondary region. After failover, they also need to run custom PowerShell scripts to update DNS records. Which Azure Site Recovery feature should they configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse recovery plans with simple failover options, overlooking that recovery plans uniquely combine order groups and runbook automation to address both sequencing and custom scripting requirements in a single feature.
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
✓
Recovery plan with automation runbooks and order groups
Azure Site Recovery recovery plans support order groups to enforce the startup sequence of VMs (front-end first, then back-end) and can include automation runbooks to execute custom PowerShell scripts, such as updating DNS records after failover. This provides a structured, automated failover workflow that meets both the sequencing and scripting requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Recovery plan with manual steps
Why it's wrong here
A recovery plan with only manual steps depends on a human operator to remember and execute the exact startup order for the web, app, and data tiers and to run custom scripts by hand during a live disaster. This human intervention lengthens RTO, is prone to errors or skipped dependencies, and cannot guarantee that scripts are executed at the correct moment in the failover sequence. In contrast, a recovery plan with automation runbooks executes the same steps automatically the instant failover occurs, so this option fails both the ordering and scripting requirements.
- ✓
Recovery plan with automation runbooks and order groups
Why this is correct
Recovery plans support order groups, so the web tier, application tier, and database tier can be assigned to separate groups that start strictly in the specified sequence. Automation runbooks can be attached as pre-action or post-action steps for each group, which lets you run custom scripts to reconfigure connections, update DNS, or mount storage right after each dependency is available. This combined capability not only satisfies the stated startup-order and script requirements but also makes failover predictable and fully automated.
- ✗
Failover with network mapping
Why it's wrong here
Failover with network mapping only lets you specify which Azure virtual network each VM's NIC should connect to after failover; it does not influence the order in which tiers start or run any custom preparation scripts. While mapping to the correct VNet is necessary for connectivity, it is completely orthogonal to sequencing and script execution. A VM can have the correct network mapping yet still come up before its database dependency is ready, so this option does not meet the requirements.
- ✗
Test failover with isolation
Why it's wrong here
Test failover with isolation is designed for disaster-recovery drills: it creates a network-isolated copy of the replicated VMs so the test does not affect the production site or the actual recovery plan. It validates that the replicated images and settings are healthy, but it does not define the production failover startup sequence, nor does it execute custom scripts in the real failover workflow. Relying only on test failover as the recovery strategy would still require manual steps and incorrect dependency start order in a genuine outage.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture
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.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-305 question from scratch — 795 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.