AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs SQL Server on an Azure virtual machine. They need to ensure high availability within a single Azure region. The solution must provide automatic failover with zero data loss (synchronous replication) and support read-only routing for reporting workloads. Which solution should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) with Availability Groups; FCI provides instance-level HA with shared storage but cannot serve read-only workloads from secondary nodes, while AGs offer database-level HA with readable secondaries and synchronous replication.
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
✓
SQL Server Always On Availability Group
SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG) provide high availability and disaster recovery at the database level. They support synchronous replication with automatic failover, ensuring zero data loss (RPO=0) within a single Azure region. Additionally, AGs allow secondary replicas to be configured as readable, enabling read-only routing for reporting workloads, which directly meets all stated 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.
- ✓
SQL Server Always On Availability Group
Why this is correct
SQL Server Always On Availability Group provides database-level high availability and disaster recovery by maintaining synchronous-commit replicas. With synchronous mode, transaction commits are acknowledged only after being hardened on both primary and secondary, so automatic failover results in zero data loss. Additionally, configuring read-only routing on the secondary replica lets reporting workloads connect to a readable secondary, offloading read traffic without compromising the primary.
- ✗
SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI)
Why it's wrong here
A SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance protects the entire SQL Server instance at the compute/storage level using shared storage (e.g., Azure Shared Disks or Storage Spaces Direct in Azure VMs). It does not replicate data on its own; the single copy of data lives on shared storage, and the secondary node owns the same storage after failover. It cannot provide synchronous zero-data-loss replication across separate storage, and it has no readable secondary replicas for reporting, so it does not meet the stated requirements.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery orchestrates VM-level replication to a secondary Azure region for disaster recovery, continuously replicating managed disks using asynchronous snapshots. It targets regional outages, not high availability within the primary region; RPO is typically a few minutes, so it cannot guarantee zero data loss. Even if used for failover, it replicates the whole VM rather than enabling readable secondary SQL replicas, so it cannot satisfy the zero-data-loss or reporting-offload requirements.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup provides application-consistent snapshots and long-term retention of SQL Server VMs, but it is purely a backup and restore mechanism. It does not monitor SQL Server health or perform automatic failover, and a restore inherently recreates data only as of the last recovery point. Because backups are taken on a schedule (e.g., daily or hourly), recent transactions since the last backup would be lost, so it cannot achieve zero data loss or provide active readable secondaries for reporting.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
High Performance Computing (HPC) on Azure
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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