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A company is using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to protect their on-premises physical servers to Azure. They need to ensure that the recovery point objective (RPO) for their critical applications is no more than 15 minutes. Which ASR replication policy setting directly influences the achievable RPO?
- AMulti-VM consistency group
- BRecovery point retention
- CFrequency of crash-consistent snapshots
- DApp-consistent snapshot frequency
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Frequency of crash-consistent snapshots
The frequency of crash-consistent snapshots (replication frequency) directly determines how often data changes are replicated to Azure, which in turn defines the maximum data loss, or RPO.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Multi-VM consistency groups ensure that multiple VMs are recovered to a common point in time, which helps with RTO for multi-tier applications but doesn't directly influence the RPO for individual VMs as much as replication frequency.
- B. Recovery point retention defines how long recovery points are stored, impacting restore window, not the RPO itself.
- D. App-consistent snapshots ensure data consistency for applications but are less frequent than crash-consistent snapshots and primarily impact RTO for application recovery, not the raw data loss RPO.
ASR Replication Frequency
The interval at which Azure Site Recovery captures and transfers data changes (crash-consistent snapshots) from the source machine to the target region, directly impacting the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- Determines the maximum potential data loss.
- Configurable in the replication policy.
- Shorter frequency leads to lower RPO but higher storage/bandwidth usage.
Memory trick: RPO's clock ticks with replication frequency, consistency's the key.