AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs SQL Server on Azure VMs using SQL Server Standard Edition. They need a disaster recovery solution that replicates the database to a secondary Azure region with a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 2 hours. They cannot use Always On Availability Groups due to licensing constraints. They also need to perform non-disruptive disaster recovery drills. Which Azure service should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Site Recovery (VM-level replication) with Azure Backup (file/volume-level backup) or assume that log shipping can meet the drill requirement, but ASR is the only option that provides automated, non-disruptive test failovers for IaaS SQL Server VMs.
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
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates entire SQL Server VMs (including their databases) to a secondary Azure region, supporting RPOs as low as 30 seconds and RTOs of 2 hours or less. It allows non-disruptive disaster recovery drills by performing test failovers in an isolated network without affecting the production environment. This solution avoids the licensing constraints of Always On Availability Groups and works with SQL Server Standard Edition.
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 for SQL Server
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for SQL Server is fundamentally a backup and restore tool, not an always-available disaster recovery solution. It captures full, differential, and transaction-log backups, but failing over requires orchestrating a restore of the recovery chain to a target SQL Server, which can exceed the 2-hour RTO once backup frequency and restore time are considered. It also lacks native test-failover capability, so DR drills would interrupt production or require elaborate manual restores.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates Azure VM disks using snapshot technology and can create application-consistent recovery points for SQL Server workloads. It provides automatic failover and, crucially, non-disruptive test failover so you can validate DR readiness without touching production. With properly configured replication frequency and timeouts, ASR can achieve recovery point objectives around 15 minutes and recovery time objectives within 2 hours, meeting the stated requirement.
- ✗
SQL Server Log Shipping to an Azure VM
Why it's wrong here
SQL Server log shipping copies transaction log backups from the primary to a secondary SQL Server at a set interval, typically 15 minutes or more, so offline data loss is limited, but RTO is not guaranteed by the feature itself. Failover requires applying any pending log backups, performing manual recovery to bring the database online, and redirecting clients, all of which can easily consume more than 2 hours. Log shipping also has no built-in drill mechanism, so testing failover involves manually taking the secondary through the recovery process, which risks breaking the replication chain.
- ✗
Geo-replication for Azure SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is a PaaS feature that automatically maintains readable asynchronous replicas in the same or a paired region and supports auto-failover groups. Because your SQL Server is installed directly on an Azure VM (IaaS), the instance sits in your control and does not appear as a database resource in the Azure SQL service, so geo-replication simply cannot be enabled for it. To protect SQL Server on an Azure VM, you must instead use VM-level or SQL Server-level replication technologies.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Designing Azure Storage Solutions
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
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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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.