AZ-104 Practice Question 10: Cross Region Restore Vault Redundancy
Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) · Test 1 · question 10 of 10
Six months ago a colleague created the Recovery Services vault rsv-prod in East US 2, set its storage replication type to Locally-redundant, and configured daily backups for 30 production VMs. An auditor now requires that the team be able to perform a restore drill into the paired secondary region, Central US, using Cross Region Restore.
You open the vault's Backup Configuration pane and find the storage replication type greyed out. What should you do?
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Answer:
Two facts combine here. First, Cross Region Restore is supported only for a Recovery Services vault that uses the GRS replication type; a locally-redundant vault has no copy of the data in the paired region to restore from. Second, the storage replication type of a vault must be changed *before* any backup is configured in it; once a backup is configured the option is disabled, which is exactly why the setting is greyed out. Since the vault cannot be converted, the supported path is a new GRS vault with Cross Region Restore enabled, then protecting the VMs there (a VM can belong to only one vault at a time, so protection in rsv-prod must be stopped, with or without retaining the existing recovery points).
Option A cannot be completed. The Cross Region Restore toggle is offered only on GRS vaults, and a staging storage account in the secondary region is a requirement *of* a cross-region restore, not a substitute for geo-redundancy.
Option C fails for the same greyed-out reason, and it solves a different problem. Cross Zonal Restore moves a restore between availability zones inside one region; it gives no protection or restore capability if the whole region is lost.
Option D describes a topology Azure Backup does not have. There is no vault-to-vault replication to configure: geo-replication of backup data is a property of the vault's storage replication type, handled by the platform.