Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment →mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
DP-300 Failover Group Practice Question
Your company has an Azure SQL Managed Instance deployed in the East US region. The database hosts a financial application that requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 seconds. The solution must use a secondary region in West US. The budget allows for a single secondary instance but must minimize compute costs during normal operations. You have configured a failover group between the primary and a secondary managed instance in West US. During a recent disaster recovery drill, you observed that the failover took 20 minutes to complete, exceeding the RTO. You need to improve the failover time to meet the 15-minute RTO without increasing costs. What should you do?
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 group to use manual failover instead of automatic; this reduces failover time because you can control the exact moment.
Configuring manual failover allows the database administrator to initiate failover immediately without waiting for a grace period. This reduces the overall failover time, as the 20-minute failover observed likely included time waiting for automatic failover to trigger after the grace period. With manual failover, the switch can be performed in less than 15 minutes. Option B is incorrect because setting the grace period to 1 hour would actually increase the time before automatic failover occurs, and enabling read-scale failover does not reduce failover time. Option C increases cost and does not directly affect failover time. Option A does not significantly reduce failover time.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Ensure the secondary managed instance is in a different virtual network and configure cross-region VNet peering for faster synchronization.
Why it's wrong here
Ensuring the secondary is in a different VNet and configuring VNet peering may improve network latency but does not directly reduce the failover time, which is dominated by the grace period and switch process.
- ✗
Create a failover group with automatic failover policy and set the grace period to 1 hour. Also, enable read-scale failover for the secondary.
Why it's wrong here
Setting the grace period to 1 hour would delay automatic failover, increasing RTO. Read-scale failover does not reduce the time to make the secondary the primary, so this option would actually worsen the RTO.
- ✗
Scale up the primary managed instance to a higher service tier (e.g., from General Purpose to Business Critical) to improve performance.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up to a higher service tier increases cost and does not inherently reduce failover time. While Business Critical offers synchronous replication, it is not necessary to meet the RTO with manual failover, and cost constraints apply.
- ✓
Configure the failover group to use manual failover instead of automatic; this reduces failover time because you can control the exact moment.
Why this is correct
Manual failover allows immediate initiation of the failover process, avoiding the grace period delay. This can reduce total failover time to less than the 15-minute RTO.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Overview of Azure Data Platform Options
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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