PAS-C01 Practice Test 37 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is migrating its SAP NetWeaver Java stack to AWS. The application uses a shared file system for SAP global transport directory and other SAP-specific directories. The company wants to ensure that the file system is highly available and can be accessed by multiple application servers across different Availability Zones. Which AWS storage solution should they use?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). For a shared file system that must be accessible by multiple SAP application servers across different Availability Zones, Amazon EFS is the appropriate choice. It provides a scalable, elastic NFS file system that can be mounted on multiple Linux instances simultaneously, ensuring high availability and durability. EBS Multi-Attach is limited to a single AZ, FSx for Windows is for Windows, and Storage Gateway is for hybrid scenarios.

Answer

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway file gateway

Answer

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with Multi-Attach enabled

Question 2

The exhibit shows a CloudFormation template snippet for deploying SAP ASCS and ERS instances. Both instances are launched in the same subnet. What is the main architectural issue with this deployment?

Accepted Answer

Both instances are in the same Availability Zone, which defeats the purpose of high availability. SAP ASCS and ERS instances form a high-availability pair, and placing both in the same subnet means they reside in the same Availability Zone. If that AZ fails, both instances go down simultaneously, defeating the purpose of the ASCS/ERS failover architecture. Proper HA design requires the ASCS and ERS instances to be in separate AZs (or at minimum, the ERS on a separate host/AZ) so that a single AZ outage does not take out both.

Answer

The AMI ID is not specified correctly

Answer

The instance type m5.large is too small for SAP

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No security group is defined, exposing the instances to the internet

Question 3

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS and wants to back up the database using Backint integration. Which AWS service is required to store the backups?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. SAP HANA's Backint API is an SAP-defined interface that lets third-party backup tools stream database backups directly to external storage. On AWS, the supported and required target for Backint-based HANA backups is Amazon S3, which stores the backup files durably and supports lifecycle transitions to colder tiers. AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA is the AWS-provided tool that implements this integration and writes to S3.

Answer

Amazon S3 Glacier

Answer

Amazon EBS

Answer

Amazon EFS

Question 4

A company runs a critical SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 X1 instance. The operations team needs to monitor the database and receive alerts when memory utilization exceeds 90% for more than 5 minutes. The team wants to use AWS native services and minimize custom development. Which solution should the team implement?

Accepted Answer

Install the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instance to collect memory metrics, create a CloudWatch alarm with a threshold of 90% for 5 minutes, and configure an Amazon SNS topic for notifications.. The CloudWatch agent is required to collect memory metrics from EC2 instances because default CloudWatch metrics do not include memory utilization. Once the agent is installed, you can create an alarm on the memory metric with a 90% threshold over 5 minutes and use SNS for notifications. This approach uses native AWS services and requires minimal custom development, making it the most efficient solution.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor memory utilization and configure an Amazon EventBridge rule to send alerts.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to monitor memory utilization and create an OpsItem when the threshold is breached.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance and create a CloudWatch alarm for the MemoryUtilization metric.

Question 5

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a single SAP HANA database EC2 instance using Amazon EBS gp3 volumes. During month-end close, users report intermittent slow response times. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volumes consistently reach their provisioned IOPS and throughput limits during these periods. The company wants to increase performance with minimal application downtime and without changing the instance type. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Modify the EBS volumes to increase provisioned IOPS and throughput, then apply the changes while the volumes are attached.. The symptoms point to EBS volume-level throttling, not instance-level limits. Amazon EBS gp3 volumes let you raise IOPS and throughput independently, and these changes can be applied online to attached volumes. That resolves the bottleneck with no downtime and no instance change. RAID 0, Multi-Attach, and instance store either require disruptive migration, do not raise volume limits, or sacrifice durability, so they are not appropriate here.

Answer

Enable EBS Multi-Attach on the existing volumes so that multiple Nitro instances can share the I/O workload.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array from multiple EBS volumes and migrate the HANA data and log files to the array.

Answer

Move the HANA database to an instance store volume to eliminate the EBS performance bottleneck.

Question 6

A company is running SAP on AWS and wants to ensure that the system meets the SLA for availability. The operations team needs to monitor the health of the SAP application stack (ASCS, PAS, DB). Which AWS service can provide a centralized dashboard to visualize the health and performance metrics?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards. Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards allow you to create customizable, centralized views of metrics from multiple AWS services and on-premises resources. For SAP on AWS, you can monitor the health and performance of the ASCS, PAS, and DB instances by collecting metrics such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and custom application metrics, and visualizing them in a single dashboard. This meets the requirement for a centralized dashboard.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon S3

Question 7

An SAP S/4HANA production system runs on AWS with a primary application server and an additional application server behind a Network Load Balancer. Users report intermittent session logouts when they are routed to different application servers during a single logon session. The SAP system uses logon groups, and the NLB is configured with a TCP listener on port 3200. What is the most likely cause and the correct remediation?

Accepted Answer

The NLB is distributing each new TCP connection independently; enable sticky sessions on the target group so a client's connections persist to one application server.. SAP GUI sessions span multiple TCP connections, and a Network Load Balancer without stickiness can place each connection on a different application server, invalidating session state and logging users out. Enabling source IP stickiness on the NLB target group keeps a client's connections pinned to one target for the configured duration. Health-check tuning, message server registration, or TLS changes do not provide the connection persistence needed to preserve SAP sessions.

Answer

The NLB health check is misconfigured and marking healthy application servers as unhealthy; change the health check to a TCP check on the SAP message server port.

Answer

The SAP message server is not registered with the NLB; register the message server as a target so clients always resolve the correct application server.

Answer

The NLB listener should use TLS termination instead of TCP passthrough; TLS session resumption will keep the client bound to one application server.

Question 8

A company runs SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) on AWS with an Oracle database on Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is experiencing performance degradation during month-end closing. The operations team needs to identify the top SQL statements causing high read I/O. Which AWS tool should they use to analyze the database workload?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS Performance Insights. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is specifically designed to monitor and troubleshoot database performance. It provides detailed metrics on SQL statements, wait events, and load, making it the ideal tool to identify high read I/O queries during month-end closing. The other services focus on API auditing, log analysis, or application tracing, not database workload analysis.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights

Answer

AWS X-Ray

Question 9

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS and wants to improve the operational resilience of its production landscape. After a recent incident, the operations team must be able to detect and respond to an impaired application server without manual intervention, and must be able to validate that the SAP system is functionally healthy after recovery. Which TWO measures should be implemented? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms on EC2 status checks and application metrics, with Amazon SNS notifications and AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks to remediate or replace impaired instances.. Operational resilience requires both automated detection and response to impaired infrastructure and a way to confirm functional health. CloudWatch alarms with SNS and Systems Manager Automation runbooks deliver automated detection and remediation, while synthetic transaction monitoring validates that business transactions succeed after recovery. The other measures address security auditing, vulnerability scanning, or bulk command execution, none of which detect or validate the SAP application health described.

Answer

Use Amazon Inspector to continuously scan the SAP EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities and generate findings for the security team.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail data events on the S3 bucket that stores SAP backups to capture object-level API activity for audit purposes.

Answer

Deploy AWS Systems Manager Agent and use AWS Systems Manager Run Command to execute SAP kernel upgrade scripts on all application servers simultaneously.

Question 10

A company is running SAP BusinessObjects on AWS. The application servers are behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ALB is configured to use a single target group. The company wants to deploy a new version of the application with zero downtime. Which deployment strategy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Implement a blue/green deployment by creating a new target group and updating the ALB listener.. A blue/green deployment allows you to create a completely new target group with the new application version, then update the ALB listener rule to route all traffic from the existing target group to the new one. This ensures zero downtime because the switch is instantaneous at the listener level, and the old environment remains intact for immediate rollback if needed.

Answer

Perform a rolling update by terminating one instance at a time and launching a new one.

Answer

Create a new ALB and update the DNS record to point to the new ALB.

Answer

Use a canary release by routing 10% of traffic to the new version.

Question 11

A company runs a critical SAP ERP system on AWS with an SAP HANA database on an x1e.32xlarge instance (3.9 TB memory). The database uses Amazon EBS gp2 volumes. The operations team notices that during peak load, the EBS burst balance is frequently depleted, causing I/O latency spikes. The team wants to eliminate the burst balance issue and improve performance predictably. Which action should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the EBS volumes to io1 or io2 Block Express volumes with provisioned IOPS.. The burst balance depletion on gp2 volumes indicates that the workload requires more sustained IOPS than the burst model can provide. Migrating to io1 or io2 volumes with provisioned IOPS ensures consistent, predictable performance independent of volume size or burst credits. This is the standard recommendation for I/O-intensive SAP HANA databases on AWS.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array of multiple gp2 volumes to aggregate IOPS and burst credits.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the EC2 instance to increase available bandwidth.

Answer

Increase the size of the gp2 volumes to increase baseline IOPS and burst balance.

Question 12

An operations team supports an SAP BW/4HANA system on AWS and wants to reduce the time spent correlating events when a nightly data load fails. They need a single place to view the SAP job log, the underlying EC2 system log, and the AWS API calls made by the automation that starts the load, all time-aligned for the same window. Which approach should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Stream SAP job logs, EC2 system logs, and CloudTrail events into Amazon CloudWatch Logs log groups and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query across them by timestamp.. CloudWatch Logs Insights queries multiple log groups at once and supports timestamp-based correlation, so streaming SAP job logs, EC2 system logs, and CloudTrail events into CloudWatch Logs produces a single time-aligned view. This directly replaces the manual cross-console correlation that was slowing down diagnosis of failed nightly BW/4HANA loads.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to open a shell on each instance and manually tail the SAP and system logs during the load window.

Answer

Configure AWS CloudTrail to deliver events to an Amazon S3 bucket and require engineers to download and grep the JSON files after each failed load.

Answer

Enable AWS X-Ray tracing on the SAP application servers and analyze the resulting service map to identify the failing load step.

Question 13

Refer to the exhibit. An SAP administrator uses the CloudFormation template snippet to create an application server. After deployment, the administrator cannot connect to the instance using AWS Systems Manager Session Manager. What is the most likely missing configuration?

Accepted Answer

The instance does not have an IAM instance profile with Systems Manager permissions. Systems Manager Session Manager requires the SSM Agent on the instance and an IAM instance profile attached to the instance that grants the SSM Agent permissions to communicate with the Systems Manager service. Without the instance profile, the agent cannot register with SSM and Session Manager connections fail.

Answer

The UserData script fails to install the SSM Agent

Answer

The security group does not allow outbound traffic to the Systems Manager endpoint

Answer

The instance type does not support Systems Manager

Question 14

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a primary application server and an additional application server for load balancing. They use AWS Systems Manager for patching and automation. After a recent kernel upgrade on the primary application server, users report intermittent logon failures. The SAP administrator needs to quickly identify whether the issue is related to the recent patch and restore service. Which TWO actions should the administrator take to diagnose and mitigate the problem? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to open a secure shell session on the primary application server and manually inspect the SAP work process logs and operating system logs.. To diagnose the issue, the administrator needs to compare the state of both servers and inspect logs. Run Command can collect kernel and trace data from both instances efficiently, while Session Manager allows interactive log inspection on the affected server. Together they provide the necessary visibility to determine if the kernel patch caused the failures and to decide on mitigation, such as reverting the kernel or adjusting configuration.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to immediately apply the same kernel patch to the additional application server to ensure consistency.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Automation to run the AWS-ApplyPatchBaseline document on the primary application server to revert the kernel to the previous version.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Compliance to check whether the primary application server is compliant with the latest patch baseline and automatically remediate any noncompliance.

Question 15

An SAP landscape on AWS includes a production SAP HANA database on an EC2 X1 instance. The operations team needs to ensure that the HANA database can be recovered to a specific point in time within the last 7 days. They use AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA to back up to Amazon S3. What should they configure to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Configure AWS Backint Agent to perform full backups daily and log backups every 15 minutes, and set the backup retention in SAP HANA to 7 days.. To achieve point-in-time recovery for SAP HANA, you must perform regular full backups and continuous log backups, and retain them for the desired period. AWS Backint Agent integrates with SAP HANA's backup and recovery tools to store backups in S3. Configuring daily full backups, frequent log backups, and a 7-day retention in SAP HANA meets the requirement. The other options do not provide the necessary log backup and recovery capabilities.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to create a daily backup plan for the EC2 instance hosting SAP HANA and set the retention period to 7 days.

Answer

Enable Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for the bucket used by AWS Backint Agent to ensure backups are available in another region for recovery.

Answer

Enable Amazon S3 versioning on the bucket used by AWS Backint Agent and set a lifecycle rule to expire noncurrent versions after 7 days.