AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs an SAP HANA database on Azure large instances (HLI) in the West US region. The database is critical for business operations. They need a disaster recovery solution with a recovery point objective (RPO) of near zero (seconds) and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 30 minutes in the event of a region-wide outage. The solution must automatically replicate data to a secondary region (East US) and support automated failover. Which design should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Site Recovery as a viable option for HLI, not realizing it only supports standard Azure VMs, or they assume synchronous replication is always better without considering the latency penalty over inter-region distances.
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
✓
Configure HANA System Replication (async) between the primary and secondary site, and use a Pacemaker cluster with Azure Load Balancer to enable automated failover
HANA System Replication (async) provides near-zero RPO by continuously replicating log changes to the secondary region, while a Pacemaker cluster with Azure Load Balancer enables automated failover within the required 30-minute RTO. This combination meets the strict RPO/RTO requirements for SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances, as Azure Site Recovery does not support HLI and synchronous replication would introduce unacceptable latency over the West US to East US distance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure HANA System Replication (async) between the primary and secondary site, and use a Pacemaker cluster with Azure Load Balancer to enable automated failover
Why this is correct
HANA System Replication with asynchronous mode provides near-zero RPO. Combined with Pacemaker and Azure Load Balancer, you can achieve automatic failover within the required RTO. This is the recommended approach for SAP HANA DR on Azure.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the HANA large instance VMs with a replication frequency of 30 seconds and enable auto-failover
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery can replicate VMs but does not ensure HANA application consistency at the database transaction level. It may cause data loss or corruption because it captures VM-level state, not HANA-consistent checkpoints. RPO near zero cannot be achieved with VM replication.
- ✗
Schedule HANA database backups every 5 minutes to Azure Blob Storage with geo-redundant storage (GRS), and restore in the secondary region on demand
Why it's wrong here
This approach can only achieve an RPO of 5 minutes at best, because any transactions committed after the last backup are lost. Manual restore from blob storage to a secondary region requires provisioning a new HANA Large Instance, restoring the full backup, replaying log backups, and starting SAP HANA — a process that typically takes hours, far exceeding the 30-minute RTO. Geo-redundant storage protects against regional outages but does not automate failover or guarantee HANA transaction consistency, and backup frequency alone cannot provide near-zero RPO.
- ✗
Set up HANA System Replication with synchronous mode to the secondary region
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous HANA System Replication forces every commit on the primary to wait for acknowledgment from the secondary before completing. Over a WAN link between Azure regions (e.g., West US to East US) this adds round-trip latency to every database transaction, severely degrading production performance and potentially exceeding SAP latency tolerances. Asynchronous replication decouples commit latency while still providing a very low RPO, so it is the appropriate mode for long-distance DR; synchronous mode is only viable on low-latency, typically in-region links.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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.
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.