AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) — Question 423

A company has developed an application that is running Windows Server on VMware vSphere VMs that the company hosts on premises. The application data is stored in a proprietary format that must be read through the application. The company manually provisioned the servers and the application.

As part of its disaster recovery plan, the company wants the ability to host its application on AWS temporarily if the company's on-premises environment becomes unavailable. The company wants the application to return to on-premises hosting after a disaster recovery event is complete. The RPO is 5 minutes.

Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Configure AWS DataSync. Replicate the data to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. When the on-premises environment is unavailable, use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision Amazon EC2 instances and attach the EBS volumes.
• B. Configure AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. Replicate the data to replication Amazon EC2 instances that are attached to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. When the on-premises environment is unavailable, use Elastic Disaster Recovery to launch EC2 instances that use the replicated volumes.
• C. Provision an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway. Replicate the data to an Amazon S3 bucket. When the on-premises environment is unavailable, use AWS Backup to restore the data to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes and launch Amazon EC2 instances from these EBS volumes.
• D. Provision an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file system on AWS. Replicate the data to the file system. When the on-premises environment is unavailable, use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision Amazon EC2 instances and use AWS::CloudFormation::Init commands to mount the Amazon FSx file shares.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is the recommended service for migrating and replicating on-premises VMware virtual machines to AWS with a low RPO (sub-second to minutes) and automated failback capabilities. It minimizes operational overhead by continuously replicating block-level data to low-cost staging resources and launching fully-functioning EC2 instances only during a disaster. Other options like AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway, or Amazon FSx require complex manual orchestration, failback configurations, and custom scripts, which significantly increase operational overhead.