AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
Your company is planning to migrate a large number of on-premises servers to Azure. The migration must be completed within 3 months. You need to assess the current on-premises environment and recommend the most appropriate Azure VM sizes and costs. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Advisor (which optimizes existing Azure resources) with Azure Migrate (which assesses on-premises environments for migration), or assume that manual inventory and pricing calculators are sufficient for large-scale migrations despite the lack of performance-based sizing.
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
✓
Use Azure Migrate to discover and assess the on-premises environment, and generate sizing and cost recommendations.
Azure Migrate is the correct tool because it provides automated discovery and assessment of on-premises servers, including performance data, dependencies, and configuration details. It then generates right-sized Azure VM recommendations and cost estimates based on actual usage, which is essential for a large-scale migration with a tight 3-month deadline.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Create a manual inventory of all servers and use Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate costs.
Why it's wrong here
A manual inventory relies on spreadsheets and human data entry, which is error-prone and quickly outdated. More importantly, it captures only static specifications (vCPU, RAM, disk size) and omits utilization rates, performance counters, and application dependencies that determine appropriate Azure VM sizing. The Azure Pricing Calculator can price a manually specified VM, but it cannot discover or right-size the workload, so the resulting estimate is often inaccurate for a migration at scale.
- ✓
Use Azure Migrate to discover and assess the on-premises environment, and generate sizing and cost recommendations.
Why this is correct
Azure Migrate is the correct service for migration planning because it performs agentless discovery of on-premises servers, collects performance history, and maps application dependencies. Its assessment engine can right-size Azure VM SKUs based on actual utilization rather than nominal hardware, and it generates cost recommendations that account for Azure Hybrid Benefit and Reserved Instances. This gives you a data-driven, repeatable basis for migration decisions.
- ✗
Use Azure Advisor to analyze on-premises server usage and recommend Azure VM sizes.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that analyzes existing Azure subscriptions and resources to provide recommendations on high availability, security, performance, and cost. It cannot connect to or scan on-premises infrastructure, so it cannot discover server workloads or collect utilization metrics needed for migration sizing. At best, Advisor would only help after migration, not for assessing the source environment.
- ✗
Use Azure Cost Management to estimate costs based on manual input of server specifications.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Cost Management is a monitoring and governance tool for tracking spend on resources already running in Azure, offering budgets, alerts, and cost analysis. It has no discovery capability and no assessment logic to identify on-premises servers or infer their Azure VM equivalents. Manually entering specifications into Cost Management is not a supported workflow; that function belongs to Azure Migrate or the Azure Pricing Calculator, so this approach misses dependency mapping and rightsizing.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This AZ-305 question is part of Courseiva's 212-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.