AZ-305 Question 137
Single answerA manufacturing company is migrating a mission-critical supply chain management database to Azure. The database must remain accessible even if the primary region experiences a complete outage. The company desires minimal administrative overhead, automated replication, and quick failover with minimal downtime. Which Azure solution best meets these high availability requirements?
- A
Deploy a single Azure SQL Database with locally redundant storage in a single region
- B
Deploy a Premium tier Azure SQL Database in a single region
- C
Configure an auto-failover group across primary and secondary Azure SQL Database instances in two regions
- D
Run SQL Server Standard on an Azure VM in an Availability Set
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Using an auto-failover group for Azure SQL Database is a recommended approach for achieving high availability with minimal management overhead. It offers asynchronous replication to a secondary database in another region and can automatically fail over if the primary region becomes unavailable. According to Microsoft documentation, auto-failover groups are the most direct approach for ensuring geo-redundancy and business continuity for managed Azure SQL databases.
- A. Incorrect.
Option 1 is incorrect because locally redundant storage only protects against local hardware failures within one region. If the entire region goes down, the database cannot fail over to another region, causing an outage.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2 is incorrect because although the Premium tier provides higher performance and built-in HA within a single region, it still does not protect against region-wide failures.
- C. Correct.
Option 3 is correct because an auto-failover group for Azure SQL Database automatically replicates data to a secondary database in another region. This allows for near-zero downtime failover if the primary region goes offline, meeting the company’s high availability requirements.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect because running SQL Server Standard on an Azure VM in an Availability Set only helps protect against local hardware failures or maintenance events. It does not inherently provide cross-region failover capability without additional complex configuration such as Always On Availability Groups, which typically require SQL Server Enterprise.