AZ-305 Question 119
Select 2A company hosts several mission-critical applications on Azure VMs in the West US region. They need to meet compliance requirements for daily backups, retain those backups for 30 days, and ensure recovery even if the entire region becomes unavailable. Which two backup configurations best meet these requirements?
- A
Use Azure Backup for daily VM backups in a Recovery Services vault with geo-redundant storage and a 30-day retention policy.
- B
Use custom VM snapshots hosted in a standard locally redundant storage (LRS) account in the same region taken weekly, with a 30-day retention.
- C
Configure Azure Backup for daily VM backups to a Recovery Services vault. Enable cross-region restore to replicate backups to a paired region, with a 30-day retention policy.
- D
Rely on Azure Site Recovery alone to replicate VMs to a secondary region without any dedicated backup policy.
- E
Enable Azure Backup snapshots on ephemeral OS disks for daily backups in the same region with 30-day retention.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
Azure Backup is the recommended service for taking consistent, point-in-time backups of Azure VMs. Using a Recovery Services vault with geo-redundant storage or enabling cross-region restore ensures redundancy and resilience against region-wide failures. Microsoft documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/backup/backup-overview) emphasizes the importance of daily backups, appropriate retention policies, and geo-redundancy or regional replication to meet compliance and recovery objectives.
- A. Correct.
Option 1 is correct. Azure Backup to a Recovery Services vault with geo-redundant storage (GRS) ensures that data is stored redundantly across multiple Azure data centers. A 30-day retention policy meets the compliance requirement for daily backups. This approach covers both frequency (daily) and data redundancy.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2 is incorrect. Relying on custom snapshots in an LRS storage account in the same region, taken only weekly, does not satisfy the daily backup requirement or protect against regional outages (because it’s stored only in one region).
- C. Correct.
Option 3 is correct. With Azure Backup configured for daily VM backups and cross-region restore enabled, backups are replicated to a paired region, providing both daily frequency and resilience against regional failures. The 30-day retention meets compliance needs.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect. Azure Site Recovery replicates VM state to another region for disaster recovery but does not provide point-in-time backups with a retention period. Therefore, it doesn't fulfill compliance requirements for a 30-day backup retention or proper backup granularity.
- E. Incorrect.
Option 5 is incorrect. Ephemeral OS disks cannot store persistent backups, and this approach remains in a single region. Using ephemeral storage for backups is not a recommended or supported approach to ensure long-term retention.