AZ-900 Describe Azure architecture and services Practice Question
Which Azure service provides low-cost, hot-standby disaster recovery for Azure VMs by replicating them to another region?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure Backup (which is for long-term data retention and restore) with Azure Site Recovery (which is for continuous replication and orchestrated failover), or they mistakenly think Geo-Redundant Storage alone provides VM-level disaster recovery without the orchestration layer.
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 for Azure VMs
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for Azure VMs is the correct service because it provides low-cost, hot-standby disaster recovery by orchestrating replication, failover, and failback of Azure VMs from one region to another. It uses continuous replication with near-synchronous recovery point objectives (RPOs) and supports automated testing of failovers without impacting production workloads.
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 Backup
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup creates periodic snapshots of VM disks and stores them in Recovery Services vaults to protect against data loss from corruption or accidental deletion. It is not a continuous replication service and does not maintain a warm standby copy of the VM in another region, so recovery requires recreating the VM from restore points. That process yields a much higher RPO and RTO than Site Recovery's ongoing replication, making it a backup tool rather than a disaster recovery solution.
- ✓
Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMs
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMs continuously replicates the entire VM, including its disks, memory, network settings, and apps, to a secondary Azure region. It delivers a low recovery point objective (RPO) of a few minutes and supports non-disruptive failover drills to validate readiness. This makes it the correct disaster recovery solution for Azure workloads, as it enables fast, orchestrated cross-region recovery.
- ✗
Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)
Why it's wrong here
Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) asynchronously replicates storage objects like blobs and files to a paired secondary region, ensuring data durability. However, GRS only protects the storage layer; it does not replicate the VM's compute configuration, operating system, or running applications. Failover with GRS requires manually reconstructing VMs from the replicated data, whereas Site Recovery automates full VM replication and orchestrated recovery.
- ✗
Azure Zone-Redundant deployment
Why it's wrong here
Azure Zone-Redundant deployment spreads resources across availability zones within a single region, protecting against individual datacenter failures but not against a region-wide disaster. Site Recovery, in contrast, replicates entire Azure VMs to a separate secondary region, providing cross-region failover. Because zone-redundant deployment never sends data outside the primary region, it cannot serve as a disaster recovery solution.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-900 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-900 exam.