You have an Azure Virtual Desktop deployment in the East US Azure region and a disaster recovery location in the West US Azure region. You need to…

An active-passive disaster recovery (DR) solution is the most appropriate recommendation. In this model, the primary Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployment runs in the East US region, while a secondary, standby deployment exists in the West US region. The resources in the passive (West US) region can be deallocated or scaled down to minimize costs, which aligns with the requirements. This model is specifically designed for controlled failover events, such as the mandated six-month tests, where the passive site is activated, tested, and then returned to a standby state. This approach provides a robust DR capability while minimizing ongoing costs and administrative overhead compared to an active-active model.

B. An active-active solution involves running fully operational deployments in both regions simultaneously, which significantly increases costs and administrative complexity, contradicting the requirements.

C. An Azure Backup vault is a component used by Azure Backup, not a DR strategy itself. This option is redundant with option D and incomplete.

D. Using only Azure Backup is a data recovery strategy, not a comprehensive disaster recovery solution for AVD. It does not provide a mechanism for controlled failover of the entire service.

1. Microsoft Learn

"Business continuity and disaster recovery for Azure Virtual Desktop." This document explicitly outlines different DR models.

Section: "Disaster recovery models" -> "Active-passive": "In an active-passive model

you have one host pool that's active and one that's deactivated... The passive host pool only gets turned on when the active host pool fails... This model is more cost-effective..." This directly supports the choice of active-passive for cost minimization and controlled failover.

Section: "Disaster recovery models" -> "Active-active": "In an active-active model

you have two active host pools in two different regions... This model has a higher cost to run because you're running session hosts

storage

and networking in both regions..." This confirms why active-active is incorrect due to higher costs.

2. Microsoft Learn

"Azure Virtual Desktop BCDR - Cloud Adoption Framework." This guide details the considerations for AVD DR.

Section: "Disaster recovery options for Azure Virtual Desktop": The document describes using Azure Site Recovery to replicate session host virtual machines to a secondary region

a typical implementation of an active-passive strategy. It emphasizes this as a method to fail over and fail back

which is required for testing.