DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment
You manage an Azure SQL Managed Instance that hosts a business-critical database. The compliance team requires that the instance be recoverable in a different Azure region if the primary region becomes unavailable, and that the failover be initiated manually only by authorized administrators. You need to configure a disaster recovery solution. Which two actions should you perform? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming active geo-replication works for Azure SQL Managed Instance, when only auto-failover groups are supported for cross-region replication.
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 the failover policy of the failover group to Manual.
Auto-failover groups are the supported cross-region disaster recovery feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance, and they provide a listener endpoint. To meet the compliance requirement that failover be manually initiated, the failover policy must be set to Manual. Zone redundancy is intra-region, active geo-replication is not available for managed instances, and Automatic policy would remove the required human control.
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 the failover policy of the failover group to Manual.
Why this is correct
Setting the failover policy to Manual ensures that failover only occurs when an administrator explicitly triggers it, matching the compliance requirement. Automatic policy would fail over without human intervention. Manual policy still allows planned and forced failover commands, so authorized personnel retain control.
- ✗
Configure active geo-replication between the two managed instances.
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication is a feature of Azure SQL Database, not Azure SQL Managed Instance. Managed instances use auto-failover groups for cross-region replication. Attempting to configure active geo-replication on a managed instance is not supported and will fail.
- ✗
Enable zone redundancy on the primary managed instance.
Why it's wrong here
Zone redundancy protects against an availability zone failure within the same region, not a full regional outage. It also does not provide a cross-region recovery target. While useful for local high availability, it does not satisfy the requirement to recover in a different region.
- ✗
Set the failover group policy to Automatic.
Why it's wrong here
An Automatic failover policy would initiate failover without administrator action, which violates the requirement that only authorized administrators trigger failover. Automatic policy is appropriate when minimal downtime is prioritized over manual control, but here manual control is explicitly required.
- ✓
Create an auto-failover group that includes the managed instance.
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups are the supported mechanism for cross-region disaster recovery for Azure SQL Managed Instance. They replicate databases to a secondary managed instance in another region and provide a listener endpoint. This directly satisfies the requirement for regional recoverability using a managed instance.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Configuring Disaster Recovery for Azure SQL
Key term
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed cloud database service that gives you nearly all the features of Microsoft SQL Server on your own server, without you having to manage the hardware or operating system.
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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.