AZ-305 Question 110
Select 2You are designing a backup and disaster recovery strategy for your organization’s mission-critical SAP workload running on Azure Virtual Machines in the West Europe region. The company requires minimal downtime in the event of a regional outage (RTO of 2 hours) and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The solution should replicate the entire environment to a secondary region. Which two design elements should you implement to meet these requirements?
- A
Configure Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VMs to a secondary region with an appropriate replication frequency.
- B
Enable zone-redundant storage (ZRS) for the VM disks in the primary region to protect against local data center failures.
- C
Enable a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region with Azure Backup for point-in-time restorations.
- D
Use daily full backups in a locally redundant Recovery Services vault (LRS) as the only disaster recovery solution.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
To provide both fast failover (for a 2-hour RTO) and minimal data loss (15-minute RPO) in the event of a regional outage, Azure Site Recovery is recommended for near-real-time VM replication to a secondary region. Using Azure Backup with a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region further protects data by providing point-in-time restorations if corruption or data loss occurs. Together, these services align with Microsoft’s best practices for disaster recovery. Refer to Azure Site Recovery documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/site-recovery/) for guidelines on replication frequency and failover strategies.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Azure Site Recovery allows near-real-time replication of your VMs to a secondary region, which helps meet a short RPO (15 minutes) and RTO (2 hours). By setting an appropriate replication frequency, you can fail over quickly and minimize data loss.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) protects data within a region by replicating across availability zones. While this improves local resiliency, it does not provide cross-region disaster recovery capabilities necessary to recover from a regional outage.
- C. Correct.
Correct. Having a Recovery Services vault in the secondary region ensures backups for point-in-time recovery and provides an additional layer for operational backups. In conjunction with Site Recovery, this delivers both near-continuous replication and the ability to restore consumed data if needed.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Relying solely on daily LRS-based backups often results in longer RPOs and slower RTOs because restoring from backups in the same region could be severely impacted during a regional outage. This alone cannot meet the strict RTO and RPO requirements for a business-critical workload.