AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
Which TWO of the following are requirements for using Azure Site Recovery to protect Azure VMs? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume a VPN gateway is required for cross-region replication, but Azure Site Recovery uses the Azure internal network or public endpoints by default, and a VPN gateway is only needed if you choose private endpoint connectivity for security isolation.
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
✓
VMs must be using managed disks
Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMs requires that the VMs use managed disks. Unmanaged disks are not supported because Site Recovery relies on the managed disk snapshot and replication capabilities to enable consistent, application-aware replication across regions. Managed disks also provide better performance, reliability, and integration with Azure's recovery services.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
VMs must use unmanaged disks
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMs only replicates VMs that use Azure managed disks. Unmanaged disks, which rely on storage account page blobs, are a legacy configuration and unsupported for ASR replication. If your VM uses unmanaged disks, you would need to migrate it to managed disks before enabling replication.
- ✓
VMs must be using managed disks
Why this is correct
Managed disks are a hard prerequisite for Azure Site Recovery of Azure IaaS VMs. ASR performs crash-consistent and app-consistent snapshots of these disks and replays them onto replica managed disks in the target region. Without managed disks, the replication engine has no supported configuration to process.
- ✗
VMs must be connected to a virtual network that has a VPN gateway to the target region
Why it's wrong here
Azure-to-Azure replication does not require a VPN gateway, ExpressRoute, or any site-to-site connectivity between source and target regions. Replication traffic flows securely over the Azure backbone from the source VM's regional endpoint to the target recovery region. You only need network connectivity to Azure public endpoints for the Mobility extension, and outbound access rules are usually sufficient.
- ✓
The source region must be a supported Azure region
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery is not enabled in every Azure region; Microsoft maintains a catalog of supported source and target region pairs. A source region must appear in that catalog and have an assigned target region for failover. Before enabling protection, you should verify regional support because some newer or sovereign regions may not be eligible.
- ✗
VMs must be at least Standard_D2s_v3 size
Why it's wrong here
There is no minimum VM size, such as Standard_D2s_v3, for Azure Site Recovery to protect an Azure VM. ASR supports any VM size that runs a supported operating system and uses managed disks, down to smaller tiers like Standard_B1s or Standard_A1_v2. Size constraints only appear on the target side if you choose a lower-tier instance than the source.
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
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.
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JA
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.