AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company uses Azure Site Recovery to replicate critical Azure virtual machines (VMs) to a secondary Azure region for disaster recovery. The VMs use managed disks and are part of a multi-tier application. After a failover, the recovery VMs must be automatically placed into a specific availability set to maintain the application architecture. How should the administrator configure this in Azure Site Recovery?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume ASR lacks native support for availability sets and default to manual recovery plans or unnecessary disk conversions, overlooking the straightforward configuration option in the replication settings.
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 the target availability set in the VM replication settings in the Recovery Services vault
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) allows you to configure the target availability set directly in the replication settings for each VM. When you enable replication for a VM, under the 'Target availability set' setting, you can select an existing availability set in the target region. ASR will then automatically place the recovered VM into that availability set during failover, ensuring the multi-tier application architecture is maintained without manual intervention.
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 the target availability set in the VM replication settings in the Recovery Services vault
Why this is correct
In Azure Site Recovery, when you enable Azure-to-Azure replication for a VM with managed disks, the 'Compute and Network' settings under the replication configuration include an explicit 'Target availability set' field. Selecting the desired target availability set there causes the failed-over VM to be automatically created within that set as part of the failover process. This is the native and supported mechanism to satisfy the requirement of automatic placement in the target region, and no post-failover scripting or disk conversion is needed.
- ✗
Create a recovery plan and add a manual step or script to move VMs to the availability set after failover
Why it's wrong here
A recovery plan’s manual step or script runs after failover, but Azure Site Recovery’s native replication settings cannot guarantee automatic placement into a specific availability set during the failover process itself—the VM would be created without that constraint, requiring post-failover intervention that violates the “automatically placed” requirement. This approach is tempting because recovery plans are designed for custom orchestration tasks, such as starting services or updating DNS, and would be correct if the goal were to adjust VM configuration after failover rather than enforce placement as part of the failover operation.
- ✗
Convert the managed disks to unmanaged disks for replication, then specify the availability set
Why it's wrong here
Converting managed disks to unmanaged disks before replication is both unnecessary and counterproductive. ASR fully supports managed disk VMs and, in the target compute and network settings, lets you choose an availability set directly for managed disks; unmanaged disks require a storage account and still do not enable any additional placement capability. The conversion would require downtime and additional data movement, and because the correct placement control already exists for managed disks, this approach introduces risk without solving the stated requirement.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery does not support placing VMs into an availability set in the target region
Why it's wrong here
The premise of this option is factually incorrect: Azure Site Recovery does support placing VMs into an availability set in the target region. During replication configuration, the 'Compute and Network' blade allows you to specify a target availability set, and ASR will apply that setting when the VM is failed over. The service even supports this for both managed and unmanaged disk VMs, so choosing this option would incorrectly conclude that the requirement is impossible to meet via native ASR.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Arc for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
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
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.