AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 769

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 CloudEndure 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 CloudEndure 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

CloudEndure Disaster Recovery provides continuous block-level replication of the virtual machines, allowing the company to easily meet the 5-minute RPO requirement with minimal manual intervention. It automates the conversion of VMware VMs to EC2 instances during a failover and supports seamless failback to the on-premises environment once it is restored. Other options involving AWS DataSync, Storage Gateway, or FSx require complex manual setup, custom scripts, or cannot easily support the application's proprietary format and the 5-minute RPO requirement.