Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment →hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment
Your company has a SQL Server on Azure VM running a critical database. The VM is in a single availability set. You need to achieve a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes in case of an Azure region failure. What should you implement?
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 Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VM to a secondary region.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can replicate the Azure VM to a secondary region with a replication frequency as low as 5 minutes, meeting the RPO of 5 minutes. Upon failover, the RTO can be less than 15 minutes if the VM is properly configured and failover is regularly tested. Option A (Always On Availability Groups with synchronous commit) can achieve low RPO, but across regions, synchronous commit introduces significant latency and requires at least three replicas (including a witness) for automatic failover, making it complex and potentially unable to meet the RTO consistently. Option C (daily backups) has an RPO of 24 hours, failing the 5-minute requirement. Option D (geo-redundant storage) provides storage-level replication but does not ensure application-consistent recovery or VM compute availability; auto-failover for storage does not fail over the VM itself. Therefore, ASR is the best choice for the specified RPO and RTO in a region failure scenario.
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 SQL Server Always On Availability Groups with synchronous commit to a secondary VM in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous commit can affect performance and may not meet RTO for region failure without additional orchestration.
- ✓
Configure Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VM to a secondary region.
Why this is correct
Azure Site Recovery provides replication with RPO of seconds to minutes and RTO of minutes.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup with daily backups and geo-restore.
Why it's wrong here
Daily backups have RPO of up to 24 hours, not 5 minutes.
- ✗
Store database files on geo-redundant storage (GRS) and enable auto-failover.
Why it's wrong here
GRS provides storage-level replication but not application-consistent failover.
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Overview of Azure Data Platform Options
Key term
SQL Server on Azure VM
SQL Server on Azure VM is a cloud service that lets you run Microsoft SQL Server software inside a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure, giving you full control over the database environment just like you would have on your own physical server.
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