AZ-301 Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An architect needs to design a BCDR solution where the secondary site actively serves read traffic during normal operations. Which pattern best describes this?
- Active-Passive (cold standby)
- Active-Passive (warm standby)
- Active-Active (multi-region) (Correct answer)
- Pilot light
Correct answer: Active-Active (multi-region)
An Active-Active multi-region pattern means both regions simultaneously handle traffic, including reads, ensuring zero failover time and enabling true load distribution.
Question 2: Which Azure service enables you to define, test, and execute automated recovery plans that sequence the failover of multiple VMs and applications?
- Azure Automation runbooks integrated with Azure Site Recovery (Correct answer)
- Azure Logic Apps triggered by Azure Monitor alerts
- Azure DevOps release pipelines
- Azure Functions with Event Grid triggers
Correct answer: Azure Automation runbooks integrated with Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery recovery plans support Azure Automation runbooks as pre/post-failover actions, enabling orchestrated, automated failover sequences across multiple VMs and tiers.
Question 3: A company requires its on-premises VMware VMs to be replicated to Azure for disaster recovery. Which Azure service handles this scenario?
- Azure Migrate with agentless replication
- Azure Site Recovery with the Configuration Server (Correct answer)
- Azure Data Box with incremental sync
- Azure Arc-enabled servers with backup extension
Correct answer: Azure Site Recovery with the Configuration Server
Azure Site Recovery with an on-premises Configuration Server (and optional Process Server) handles replication of VMware VMs to Azure for DR purposes.
Question 4: An organization wants to minimize costs for their disaster recovery environment by keeping Azure resources in a minimal state and scaling up only during failover. Which DR strategy does this represent?
- Active-Active
- Warm standby
- Pilot light (Correct answer)
- Cold standby
Correct answer: Pilot light
The Pilot light strategy keeps a minimal core infrastructure running in the DR region (just enough to 'light the pilot') and scales up compute resources only when failover is triggered.
Question 5: Which Azure feature allows you to test an Azure Site Recovery failover without affecting production replication or end users?
- Planned failover
- Unplanned failover
- Test failover using an isolated virtual network (Correct answer)
- Failback to the primary region
Correct answer: Test failover using an isolated virtual network
Test failover in Azure Site Recovery spins up replicated VMs in an isolated Azure virtual network, allowing DR validation without disrupting ongoing replication or production workloads.
Question 6: A solutions architect must ensure that an Azure Cosmos DB account can serve reads and writes from multiple regions simultaneously with no single point of failure. Which configuration achieves this?
- Single-region account with zone redundancy enabled
- Multi-region account with single-write region and multiple read regions
- Multi-region account with multi-region writes enabled (Correct answer)
- Geo-redundant backup with manual failover
Correct answer: Multi-region account with multi-region writes enabled
Enabling multi-region writes (multi-master) in Azure Cosmos DB allows all configured regions to accept both reads and writes simultaneously, eliminating any single point of failure for write operations.
Question 7: When designing a BCDR strategy for Azure App Service, which combination provides geo-redundancy with automatic failover and lowest RTO?
- App Service with deployment slots and manual swap
- Two App Service instances in different regions behind Azure Traffic Manager with health probes (Correct answer)
- App Service with Azure Backup and point-in-time restore
- App Service Environment with zone redundancy in a single region
Correct answer: Two App Service instances in different regions behind Azure Traffic Manager with health probes
Deploying App Service instances in multiple regions with Azure Traffic Manager health probes enables automatic DNS-based failover, providing geo-redundancy with the lowest achievable RTO.
AZ-301 Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery 2
An architect needs to design a BCDR solution where the secondary site actively serves read traffic during normal operations.
Which pattern best describes this?