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AZ-305 Practice Question 6: VM Regional DR Objectives

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · Test 1 · question 6 of 10

Business Continuitymedium

A retailer runs a three-tier line-of-business application on 60 Azure virtual machines in the North Europe region. After a tabletop exercise, the board mandates that a complete loss of North Europe must be survivable with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours. The web, application, and database tiers must be brought online in a defined order, and the DR plan must be rehearsed every quarter without interrupting production or pausing replication.

Which solution should you recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. Replicate the VMs to West Europe with Azure Site Recovery, model the tier startup order in a recovery plan, and run a test failover into an isolated virtual network each quarter

Site Recovery replicates disk writes continuously through a cache storage account and generates crash-consistent recovery points every five minutes by default, which comfortably clears a 15-minute RPO. A recovery plan groups machines and sequences the groups, so the database tier can be required to come up before the application and web tiers, and scripts can be attached between groups. Test failover creates the VMs in a separate, isolated network from a chosen recovery point while normal replication keeps running; that is the quarterly rehearsal requirement, met without touching production.

Option A misses the RPO. Even an enhanced Azure Backup policy takes recovery points at most every few hours, not every fifteen minutes, and a cross-region restore of 60 VMs is a bulk data copy that will not finish inside a two-hour RTO. Backup answers "recover a deleted or corrupted VM", not "fail a workload over to another region on a clock".

Option C protects against the wrong failure. Availability zones are separate datacenters *within* North Europe; they give excellent resilience to a zonal outage but no protection at all when the requirement is explicitly the loss of the whole region.

Option D gives a 24-hour RPO, an order of magnitude worse than the requirement, and the rebuild is a hand-written runbook with no rehearsed ordering, no health tracking, and no tested failover path.

Reference: Azure to Azure disaster recovery architecture in Azure Site Recovery

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