AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company has an on-premises Hyper-V environment with 20 virtual machines running various workloads. They want to use Azure as a disaster recovery site. The required recovery point objective (RPO) is 15 minutes, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 2 hours. They want to automate failover and failback. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse the Recovery Services Vault (a storage container) with the actual DR service (Azure Site Recovery), or they mistakenly think Azure Backup can meet low RPO/RTO requirements for disaster recovery when it is designed for backup, not replication with automated failover.
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) is the correct service because it provides orchestrated replication, failover, and failback for Hyper-V VMs to Azure as a DR site. It supports the required RPO of 15 minutes (using near-synchronous replication with change tracking) and RTO of 2 hours (via automated recovery plans), and it natively automates both failover and failback processes without additional scripting.
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 Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is the only option that provides continuous, near-synchronous replication of Hyper-V VMs to Azure, with RPOs as low as 30 seconds and the ability to meet a 15-minute RPO. It uses the Azure Site Recovery Provider installed on the Hyper-V host and the Microsoft Recovery Services Agent, replicating VHDs to Azure storage while enabling orchestrated test failovers, planned/unplanned failovers, and failback. This is true disaster recovery, not backup or migration.
- ✗
Azure Migrate
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a discovery, assessment, and migration tool that includes Server Migration, which uses a replication agent to copy VMs to Azure for a one-time lift-and-shift migration. Once the migration is complete, replication stops and no ongoing DR capability, failover orchestration, or failback is provided. It cannot meet a continuous RPO of 15 minutes because it is not designed for post-migration disaster recovery.
- ✗
Azure Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for Hyper-V VMs performs scheduled backups—typically once daily—using the MARS agent or MABS, storing recovery points in a Recovery Services vault. While it can restore files or VMs back to the original Hyper-V host, it does not orchestrate failover of VMs to Azure or provide failback. With a default RPO of 24 hours (and worst-case 2 days), it cannot achieve a 15-minute RPO, and it is a data-protection service, not a disaster-recovery orchestration service.
- ✗
Azure Recovery Services Vault
Why it's wrong here
A Recovery Services vault is merely an Azure storage container that holds recovery points (for Azure Backup) and replication settings/health data (for Azure Site Recovery). It does not perform any replication, failover, or failback by itself; you must configure an underlying service inside the vault, such as Site Recovery or Backup. Selecting a vault alone gives you no disaster recovery capability, so it is not a service that can meet the RPO or failover requirements.
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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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