AZ-305 - Design Infrastructure Solutions (38% of the exam) - Section 4.3

Design migration solutions for workloads moving from on-premises or other clouds to Azure.

Use Azure Migrate to assess and plan migration of on-premises workloads, and select the right migration strategy - rehost, refactor, or rearchitect - based on business and technical constraints. Apply the cloud adoption framework to structure the migration and use Azure Database Migration Service for database cutovers.

Azure Migratemigration strategies (rehost refactor rearchitect)Azure Database Migration Servicelift and shiftcloud adoption framework

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleDesign Infrastructure Solutionsmedium

A production SQL Server 2019 instance with 18 TB of transactional data must be migrated to Azure with the shortest possible application downtime; the team has chosen Azure SQL Managed Instance as the target. Which Azure Database Migration Service capability fits?

AUse DMS to perform an offline migration to Azure SQL Database.
BUse Data Migration Assistant to apply schema and data changes directly to the Managed Instance.
CUse AzCopy sync to keep the SQL data files synchronised between on-premises and Managed Instance.
DUse DMS to perform an online migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance. Correct

DMS online migrations target Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server on Azure VM; Azure SQL Database is offline-only via DMS. DMS supports online migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance, which keeps the source available during migration and minimises cutover downtime. The feature matrix shows Managed Instance and SQL Server on Azure VM are the targets that support online migrations through DMS.

Why A is wrong: Azure SQL Database supports offline-only migration via DMS, and the requirement specifies Managed Instance as the target.

Why B is wrong: Data Migration Assistant is an assessment tool; it does not perform online migrations of multi-terabyte workloads.

Why C is wrong: AzCopy moves blobs and files; it cannot replicate SQL Server transaction logs into Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Why D is correct: Correct. DMS supports online migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance, which keeps the source available during migration and minimises cutover downtime.

See more AZ-305 practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Design Infrastructure Solutions

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the AZ-305 bank for this domain.

Run Azure Migrate Collector to capture a one-time inventory snapshot and upload it to the project.
Why it is wrong: Collector is documented for quick snapshot discovery in air-gapped or restricted networks; it does not stream continuous performance data needed for right-sizing.
Disable cloud tiering and let the Windows Server cache every file locally for fastest access at all times.
Why it is wrong: Caching everything reproduces the disk-fill problem; the requirement is to keep storage usage low while preserving the namespace.
Traffic Manager Priority routing, because DNS-based failover is the documented method for sub-second region cutover.
Why it is wrong: Traffic Manager is DNS-based; DNS TTL caching means failover is not sub-second and cannot transform headers because it never touches the request.

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