- A
Azure Backup with backup policies set to 15-minute frequency
Why wrong: Azure Backup is designed for backup, not disaster recovery with failover orchestration. It does not support multi-VM consistent recovery or test failover in the same way.
- B
Azure Site Recovery with crash-consistent replication
Why wrong: Crash-consistent replication does not guarantee application consistency across multiple VMs, which is required for the application state.
- C
Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication
App-consistent replication ensures data integrity across VMs, meets the 15-minute RPO, and supports test failover without impact.
- D
Azure Backup with application-consistent snapshot
Why wrong: Azure Backup can take app-consistent snapshots, but it is not designed for orchestrated DR to a secondary region with RTO of 2 hours.
AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
This AZ-305 practice question tests your understanding of design business continuity solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company runs critical Azure virtual machines (VMs) in the West US region. They need a disaster recovery solution that replicates VMs to East US. The recovery point objective (RPO) must be 15 minutes and the recovery time objective (RTO) must be 2 hours. The VMs use managed disks and the application requires consistent state across multiple VMs. They want to test failover without impacting production. Which Azure service should they use?
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
Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication
Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication (Option C) is correct because it meets the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 2 hours while ensuring consistent state across multiple VMs. App-consistent replication uses Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to quiesce applications and flush memory writes to disk, guaranteeing that the recovered VMs are in a crash-consistent state at the application level. This is essential for multi-VM applications that require transaction consistency, and Azure Site Recovery supports planned and unplanned failover testing without impacting production via isolated test failover networks.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Backup with backup policies set to 15-minute frequency
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is designed for backup, not disaster recovery with failover orchestration. It does not support multi-VM consistent recovery or test failover in the same way.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery with crash-consistent replication
Why it's wrong here
Crash-consistent replication does not guarantee application consistency across multiple VMs, which is required for the application state.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication
Why this is correct
App-consistent replication ensures data integrity across VMs, meets the 15-minute RPO, and supports test failover without impact.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- ✗
Azure Backup with application-consistent snapshot
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup can take app-consistent snapshots, but it is not designed for orchestrated DR to a secondary region with RTO of 2 hours.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse Azure Backup (which is for point-in-time backups with longer RTO) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for continuous replication and failover), and they may incorrectly assume crash-consistent replication is sufficient for multi-VM application consistency when app-consistent replication is explicitly required.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
App-consistent replication in Azure Site Recovery leverages VSS writers to coordinate snapshot creation across all disks of a VM, ensuring that in-flight transactions are committed and logs are flushed. For multi-VM consistency, ASR uses recovery plans that can enforce a common crash-consistent or app-consistent point across all VMs in the plan, which is critical for applications like SQL Server or SAP that rely on write-order fidelity. The RPO of 15 minutes is achieved by replicating changes every few seconds to minutes, while the RTO of 2 hours accounts for the time to spin up VMs in East US and apply any pending replication data.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this AZ-305 question test?
Design business continuity solutions — This question tests Design business continuity solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication — Azure Site Recovery with app-consistent replication (Option C) is correct because it meets the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 2 hours while ensuring consistent state across multiple VMs. App-consistent replication uses Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to quiesce applications and flush memory writes to disk, guaranteeing that the recovered VMs are in a crash-consistent state at the application level. This is essential for multi-VM applications that require transaction consistency, and Azure Site Recovery supports planned and unplanned failover testing without impacting production via isolated test failover networks.
What should I do if I get this AZ-305 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
About these practice questions
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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.
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