Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Relational Database HA and DR

An energy grid utility company deploys its core telemetry monitoring application to an Azure SQL Managed Instance in the East US region. To design a disaster recovery solution in the West US region, you must satisfy the following requirements:
- The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 30 minutes.
- The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 15 minutes.
- Client applications must automatically reconnect after a failover without requiring connection string modifications.
- Read-heavy reporting workloads must be offloaded to the secondary region to avoid impacting primary write operations.

Which two configurations should you include in the design to meet these requirements?

  1. Create an auto-failover group containing the primary and secondary SQL Managed Instances.Answer
  2. Configure the reporting applications to connect using the read-only listener endpoint of the auto-failover group.Answer
  3. C
    Configure active geo-replication at the database level between the primary and secondary instances.
  4. D
    Deploy SQL Server on Azure virtual machines using Standard SSD storage and configure Always On availability groups.

Answer

To meet the requirements, you should create an auto-failover group containing the primary and secondary SQL Managed Instances, and configure reporting applications to connect using the read-only listener endpoint of the auto-failover group.
Creating an auto-failover group provides the replication and traffic routing mechanism required for Azure SQL Managed Instance. It generates a read-write listener for primary write operations and a read-only listener to offload query workloads to the secondary instance in the West US region. This setup satisfies both RTO and RPO requirements and avoids application configuration changes upon failover.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Determine replication capability of Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Identify that Azure SQL Managed Instance does not support database-level active geo-replication and instead requires instance-level auto-failover groups for disaster recovery replication.
This ensures the correct deployment model is chosen for the database tier.
2
Address automatic client redirection requirements.
Establish listener endpoints by configuring an auto-failover group.
The listener endpoints automatically point to the new primary instance after a failover, eliminating the need to update application connection strings.
3
Offload read-only reporting queries.
Use the read-only listener endpoint to route reporting queries to the geo-secondary replica.
This prevents read workloads from consuming resources on the primary write database.

Key Concept

Azure SQL Managed Instance supports high availability and disaster recovery across regions using auto-failover groups, which provide separate read-write and read-only listener endpoints for seamless client redirection.
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