DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment
You have an Azure SQL Managed Instance named MI1 in the West Europe region. The instance hosts a mission-critical database that must be recoverable in a different region within 15 minutes of a regional outage. The solution must minimize data loss and administrative overhead. You need to implement a disaster recovery solution. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that geo-redundant backups alone can meet a tight recovery time objective, when they actually require a restore operation that may exceed the allowed time.
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
✓
Configure an auto-failover group between MI1 and a secondary managed instance in another region.
Auto-failover groups are the recommended disaster recovery feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance. They enable automatic failover to a secondary instance in another region, ensuring rapid recovery and minimal data loss with low administrative effort. Geo-redundant backups and replication methods do not provide the required RTO and automation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable geo-redundant backup storage for MI1.
Why it's wrong here
Geo-redundant backup storage replicates backups to a paired region, but restoring a database from backup typically takes longer than 15 minutes and may result in data loss up to the last backup. It does not provide rapid failover or minimal data loss as required.
- ✗
Create a transactional replication subscription to a SQL Server on an Azure VM in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Transactional replication can replicate data to another region, but it requires manual setup, monitoring, and failover. It adds significant administrative overhead and may not meet the 15-minute RTO without automated failover, making it unsuitable for this scenario.
- ✓
Configure an auto-failover group between MI1 and a secondary managed instance in another region.
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups for Azure SQL Managed Instance provide automatic failover to a secondary instance in another region, with a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds and recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes. They minimize data loss and administrative overhead by automating the failover process.
- ✗
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the managed instance to another region.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery is designed for virtual machines, not for Azure SQL Managed Instance. It cannot replicate a managed instance directly, and using it would require deploying and managing SQL Server on VMs, increasing complexity and not meeting the managed instance requirement.
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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.