AZ-305 Design infrastructure solutions Practice Question
Your company plans to migrate a large number of on-premises virtual machines to Azure. You need to assess the current environment and migrate the workloads with minimal downtime. Which THREE Azure services or tools should you use? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Data Box with Azure Import/Export Service, but Data Box is the modern, recommended service for large-scale offline migration, while Import/Export is outdated and less integrated with Azure Migrate and Site Recovery.
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 Data Box
Azure Data Box is correct because it enables large-scale offline data transfer for environments with limited network bandwidth, allowing you to migrate terabytes of VM data to Azure without relying on slow or unstable connections. This service is ideal for the initial bulk copy of on-premises VM disks, which can then be used with Azure Migrate for assessment and Azure Site Recovery for ongoing replication with minimal downtime.
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 App Service
Why it's wrong here
Azure App Service is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile backends. It cannot discover, assess, or replicate on-premises virtual machines, nor does it perform any physical or logical data transfer for VM migration. Attempting to use it would require re-architecting each workload into a web app, which is a code-level modernization effort, not a migration path. Therefore, it does not satisfy the requirement to migrate on-premises VMs to Azure.
- ✗
Azure Import/Export Service
Why it's wrong here
Azure Import/Export Service transfers data via physical hard drives shipped to an Azure datacenter, which introduces days of latency and requires manual intervention, making it incapable of meeting the minimal-downtime requirement for live virtual machine migration. It is tempting because it efficiently handles large offline datasets, such as archival backups or bulk file uploads, where network bandwidth is limited and downtime is acceptable.
- ✓
Azure Data Box
Why this is correct
Azure Data Box is a physical appliance that Microsoft ships to your site, enabling secure, offline bulk transfer of up to 80 TB of data over a high-speed local copy path when network bandwidth is limited or non-existent. After you copy data onto the device, you return it, and Microsoft uploads the data to an Azure storage account. This makes Data Box ideal for large initial data loads, but it is not itself a continuous replication or live migration tool; it facilitates lifting and shifting data, which can then be attached to newly deployed VMs. For a migration involving a huge volume of on-premises data with constrained connectivity, Data Box provides the fastest and most cost-effective way to move the raw data into Azure.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates replication and disaster recovery for on-premises VMs and physical servers, continuously copying disk data to Azure with near-synchronous consistency. It enables minimal-downtime cutover by letting you test failovers and then execute a planned failover, which keeps downtime to seconds or minutes. ASR is the correct choice when the migration requires the live VM to keep running on-premises until the final switch, because it does not require an offline data copy. This satisfies a minimal-downtime requirement for VM migration, unlike offline transfer methods.
- ✓
Azure Migrate
Why this is correct
Azure Migrate is the centralized hub for discovery, assessment, and migration of on-premises workloads to Azure. It uses agent-based or agentless discovery to inventory VMs, map dependencies, and provide right-sizing recommendations and cost estimates before you commit to migration. While Azure Migrate itself orchestrates and tracks the migration, it relies on components like Azure Site Recovery (for replication) or Data Box (for offline data movement) to execute the actual data transfer. As the initial assessment and planning tool, it ensures you have a validated migration strategy and identifies any compatibility or licensing issues.
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.
About these practice questions
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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.