Question

Difficulty: Very hardDesign Azure Backup Solutions

You are designing an Azure Backup solution for a suite of critical Azure Virtual Machines hosting an enterprise financial application. The solution must satisfy the following technical requirements:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum data loss window must be no more than 44 hours.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The solution must support immediate recovery from local disk snapshots for backups taken within the last 55 days.
- Disaster Recovery: Backups must be replicated to a secondary region. The design must allow administrators to restore virtual machines to the secondary region even if the primary Azure region suffers a complete, prolonged outage.
- Cost Optimization: Yearly backup recovery points must be stored in the most cost-effective tier after their first 3030 days in the vault.

Which two configuration actions should you include in the backup design to meet the requirements?

  1. Configure the Recovery Services vault to use Geo-redundant storage (GRS) and enable Cross Region Restore (CRR).Answer
  2. Create an Enhanced backup policy configured with a backup schedule of every 44 hours and an instant restore snapshot retention of 55 days.Answer
  3. C
    Create a Standard backup policy configured with a daily backup schedule and set the instant restore snapshot retention to 55 days.
  4. D
    Configure a backup policy that transitions the daily recovery points to the Vault-archive tier after 55 days.
  5. E
    Configure the Recovery Services vault to use Locally redundant storage (LRS) and configure Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to replicate the backup vault metadata.

Answer

To meet the requirements, you must configure the Recovery Services vault to use Geo-redundant storage (GRS) and enable Cross Region Restore (CRR), and create an Enhanced backup policy configured with a backup schedule of every 44 hours and an instant restore snapshot retention of 55 days.
The correct configuration combines an Enhanced backup policy and a GRS-configured Recovery Services vault with Cross Region Restore enabled. The Enhanced policy is required to achieve sub-daily backups (every 44 hours) to satisfy the 44-hour RPO, and it natively supports the 55-day instant restore retention. Storing backups in a GRS vault with CRR enabled satisfies the disaster recovery requirement by replicating the backup data to the paired region and making it read-accessible for restores even when the primary region is completely unavailable.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze RPO requirements to determine the backup policy type.
Since the RPO is 44 hours, multiple backups must be taken throughout the day. Standard backup policies only support a single daily backup. Therefore, an Enhanced backup policy is required.
Enhanced backup policies allow scheduling multiple backups per day (such as every 44 hours), whereas Standard policies are constrained to once per day.
2
Evaluate the RTO and instant restore retention configuration.
The Enhanced backup policy must be configured with an instant restore snapshot retention of 55 days.
This keeps 55 days of snapshots on the local source disks, enabling immediate recovery (Instant Restore) without pulling data from the vault tier.
3
Address the disaster recovery requirement for region outages.
Configure the Recovery Services vault with Geo-redundant storage (GRS) and enable Cross Region Restore (CRR).
GRS replicates backup data to a secondary region. Enabling CRR allows administrators to initiate restores in the secondary region even if the primary region is completely offline.
4
Assess the feasibility of archiving daily backups.
Reject any design that attempts to archive daily backups or archive data with a retention of less than 180180 days.
Azure Backup's Vault-archive tier only supports monthly and yearly recovery points, and mandates a minimum retention duration of 180180 days.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring the correct Azure VM backup policy tier (Standard vs Enhanced) and storage redundancy settings (GRS with CRR) to satisfy RPO, RTO, and regional disaster recovery requirements.
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