Azure Site Recovery for VMs — Disaster Recovery with SQL Database
Your organization has a critical application deployed on Azure VMs in the West US region. The application uses a Standard_D8s_v3 VM with two data disks (512 GB each) and a separate log disk (256 GB). The application writes data continuously to the data disks and logs. The business continuity requirements are: RPO of 15 minutes, RTO of 2 hours, and the ability to recover to a specific point in time within the last 7 days. You need to design a disaster recovery solution that replicates the VMs and disks to the East US region. The solution must also support failback to West US after a disaster. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Azure Backup (which is for backup and long-term retention) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for replication and DR), leading candidates to choose a backup-based solution that cannot meet the required RPO or support failback.
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 Site Recovery to replicate the VMs to East US with a recovery plan that includes the VM and disks, and configure failback using reprotection
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the correct service for orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs between regions. It supports the required RPO of 15 minutes (using near-synchronous replication with change tracking) and RTO of 2 hours, and allows point-in-time recovery via recovery points. The reprotection and failback workflow enables you to replicate back to West US after a disaster, meeting the full business continuity requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VMs to East US with a recovery plan that includes the VM and disks, and configure failback using reprotection
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the correct choice because it provides continuous, application-consistent replication of Azure VMs to a secondary region (East US) with a recovery point objective (RPO) as low as a few seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) that can be met via orchestrated recovery plans. Including the VM and disks in a recovery plan ensures that all dependent resources fail over in the correct order, and reprotection enables automated failback to the primary region after the disaster is resolved, fulfilling the stated DR requirement.
- ✗
Use Azure Migrate to migrate the VMs to East US and then set up replication back to West US
Why it's wrong here
Azure Migrate is a migration service designed for discovering and moving on-premises or Azure workloads to Azure in a one-time cutover, not for ongoing replication or automated disaster recovery. Migrating VMs to East US simply relocates them; it does not create a continuous replication pipeline back to West US, and there is no built-in failover or failback mechanism. To maintain DR capability you would need to pair Azure Migrate with Azure Site Recovery or another replication solution, so this option is incorrect because it does not satisfy the continuous replication and failback requirements.
- ✗
Configure Azure Backup for the VMs with a backup policy that has a 15-minute frequency and replicate backups to the East US region using geo-redundant storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for Azure VMs supports a minimum backup frequency of 1 hour and a maximum of one snapshot per day, so a 15-minute frequency policy is technically impossible. Even if backups were taken every hour, they are point-in-time copies that must be restored to a new VM during a disaster, which incurs significant RTO and does not provide orchestrated failover. Geo-redundant storage only protects against regional storage outages; it does not automate the recovery of compute, networking, or application state, so this option fails to meet the stated RPO and RTO requirements.
- ✗
Use Azure Storage geo-redundant storage (GRS) for the managed disks and manually attach the disks to a new VM in East US during a disaster
Why it's wrong here
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is a storage account-level feature that replicates blobs, files, and other storage objects across regions, but managed disks used by Azure VMs do not support GRS—they are limited to locally redundant or zone-redundant storage. Even if you manually copied VHDs to a GRS storage account, you would still have to create a new VM from those copies during a disaster, a manual process that yields RTOs in hours or days and requires manual configuration of networking and dependencies. Storage-level replication alone does not orchestrate VM failover or handle application startup, so this option is incorrect for meeting disaster recovery RPO/RTO targets.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Database Migration Service
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
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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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on AZ-305
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. Your organization has a critical application running on Azure Virtual Machines. You need to design a backup and disaster recovery strategy. Which TWO options should you include in your design to meet a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour? (Choose two.)
medium- A.Store data in Azure Files and use Azure File Sync for replication.
- ✓ B.Implement Azure Site Recovery with replication to a secondary region.
- C.Use Azure Traffic Manager to distribute traffic between regions.
- D.Configure Azure Backup for daily backups with geo-redundant storage.
- ✓ E.Enable application-consistent snapshots for the VMs within the replication policy.
Why B: Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates Azure VMs to a secondary region with configurable recovery points. By enabling application-consistent snapshots within the replication policy, you can achieve an RPO of 15 minutes (snapshot frequency) and an RTO of 1 hour (failover time), meeting the stated requirements.
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.