DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment
You administer an Azure SQL Database named SalesDB that uses the Business Critical service tier. The database is deployed in the West Europe region, which supports availability zones. The application requires that the database remains available even if an entire availability zone fails. You need to configure the database to meet this requirement with minimal administrative effort. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse zone-level high availability with regional disaster recovery, leading to selection of geo-replication or failover groups instead of zone redundancy.
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
✓
Enable zone redundancy on the database.
Zone redundancy in the Business Critical service tier spreads replicas across availability zones, ensuring automatic failover if a zone becomes unavailable. It is a simple configuration toggle that requires no application changes, providing high availability at the zone level. Other options address regional disasters or involve migration, which are not minimal-effort solutions for zone-level resilience.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure active geo-replication to a secondary region.
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication provides cross-region disaster recovery, not protection from a single availability zone failure within a region. It introduces additional cost and management overhead, and failover to another region is not automatic. This does not meet the requirement for zone-level high availability with minimal effort.
- ✓
Enable zone redundancy on the database.
Why this is correct
Zone redundancy for Business Critical Azure SQL Database automatically distributes replicas across multiple availability zones, so if one zone fails, the database remains online with no manual intervention. It requires no application changes and is enabled with a single setting, meeting the minimal-effort requirement. This is the correct approach for zone-level high availability.
- ✗
Create a failover group with an auto-failover policy.
Why it's wrong here
Failover groups are designed for regional failover and manage multiple databases across regions. They do not protect against an availability zone outage within the primary region. Additionally, configuring a failover group is more complex than enabling zone redundancy and is unnecessary for this scenario.
- ✗
Deploy the database to a SQL Managed Instance with zone redundancy.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to SQL Managed Instance is a significant change and not minimal effort. While Managed Instance can be zone-redundant, the requirement is to configure the existing Azure SQL Database. This option introduces unnecessary complexity and does not directly address the zone failure for the current database.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Implementing High Availability for Azure SQL Databases
Key term
Azure SQL Performance Tuning
Azure SQL Performance Tuning is the process of optimizing the speed and efficiency of queries and database operations in Microsoft Azure SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance to reduce latency and improve throughput.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
This DP-300 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 DP-300 exam.