PAS-C01 Practice Exam 64 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company is migrating a legacy on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB and has a 1-hour maintenance window. The company needs to minimize downtime and ensure data consistency. Which migration strategy should be used?

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

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) with ongoing replication from the source to the target.. AWS DMS with ongoing replication minimizes downtime by continuously replicating changes from the source to the target, allowing a cutover with minimal downtime. Native Oracle tools (Data Pump) or exporting to flat files require significant downtime, and AWS SCT only handles schema conversion.

Answer

Use Oracle Data Pump to export and import the database during the maintenance window.

Answer

Use AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) to convert the schema and then copy data manually.

Answer

Export the database to flat files, upload to Amazon S3, and then import into RDS.

Question 2

An organization is migrating a SAP ERP system to AWS. The system has a requirement for high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) instance. Which architecture should be used to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Deploy two ASCS instances in different Availability Zones with a shared Amazon EFS or FSx for Windows File Server and a floating IP using Route 53.. For high availability of SAP Central Services (ASCS), you need to deploy two ASCS instances in different Availability Zones with a shared filesystem (Amazon EFS or FSx for Windows File Server) and a floating IP mechanism. Option B correctly describes this architecture using Route 53 for the floating IP. Option A is incorrect because Multi-AZ RDS is for databases, not ASCS. Option C is incorrect because an EBS volume cannot be attached to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously. Option D is incorrect because an Application Load Balancer does not support floating IPs and is not appropriate for ASCS.

Answer

Deploy the ASCS on a single EC2 instance with a Multi-AZ RDS database.

Answer

Deploy two ASCS instances in different Availability Zones with an EBS volume attached to both.

Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic between two ASCS instances.

Question 3

Which TWO AWS services can be used to migrate an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server with minimal downtime? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT). Correct options: B and D. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) can perform live migration with continuous change data capture (CDC) for minimal downtime. AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) helps convert the on-premises SQL Server schema to be compatible with Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Options A, C, and E are incorrect: AWS Snowball Edge (A) is for offline data transfer, not minimal downtime; Amazon EC2 with SQL Server (C) is a target but not a migration service; AWS Direct Connect (E) provides network connectivity but does not perform the migration itself.

Answer

AWS Snowball Edge

Answer

Amazon EC2 with SQL Server

Answer

AWS Direct Connect

Question 4

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing high CPU utilization on the application server during peak hours. The SAP administrator wants to add a new application server instance to distribute the load. Which AWS service should be used to automatically register the new instance with the existing SAP system's load balancer?

Accepted Answer

Auto Scaling group. An Auto Scaling group can automatically launch new EC2 instances based on scaling policies (e.g., when CPU utilization exceeds a threshold) and, when configured with a lifecycle hook or a launch template that includes a user-data script, can register the new instance with the existing SAP system's load balancer (such as an Application Load Balancer or Classic Load Balancer). This ensures the new application server is automatically added to the load balancer target group, distributing incoming traffic without manual intervention.

Answer

AWS Lambda

Answer

Amazon SQS

Answer

AWS CloudFormation

Question 5

A company is running SAP on AWS and needs to back up their SAP HANA database daily. The backup must be stored cost-effectively and retained for 7 years for compliance. Which AWS service should be used for long-term backup storage?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the correct choice because it provides the lowest-cost storage for long-term archival data, with retrieval times ranging from 12 to 48 hours, which is acceptable for a daily backup retained for 7 years. This service is specifically designed for compliance and regulatory retention where infrequent access is expected, making it the most cost-effective option for the given requirements.

Answer

Amazon S3 One Zone-IA

Answer

Amazon S3 Standard

Answer

Amazon EBS Snapshots

Question 6

A company is migrating its SAP HANA database to AWS. The database requires high I/O and low latency. Which storage option should be used for the /hana/data volume?

Accepted Answer

io2 EBS volume. The /hana/data volume for SAP HANA requires high I/O and low latency, which is best met by io2 EBS volumes. io2 volumes are provisioned IOPS SSD volumes designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads, offering up to 64,000 IOPS per volume and 99.999% durability, making them ideal for SAP HANA data files.

Answer

gp3 EBS volume

Answer

Amazon S3

Answer

Amazon EFS

Question 7

A company runs SAP Business Suite on AWS. They notice that their SAP application servers are not evenly distributing load across multiple instances. They have configured an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of the SAP Web Dispatchers. What is the MOST likely cause of uneven load distribution?

Accepted Answer

Sticky sessions (session stickiness) are enabled on the ALB.. When sticky sessions (session stickiness) are enabled on an Application Load Balancer, the ALB uses a cookie to bind a client's session to a specific target (SAP Web Dispatcher). This prevents the load balancer from distributing subsequent requests from that client to other healthy targets, causing an uneven distribution of load across the SAP application servers, especially if a few clients generate a disproportionate number of requests.

Answer

The ALB health check interval is too short.

Answer

Cross-zone load balancing is enabled.

Answer

The ALB is using the least outstanding requests routing algorithm.

Question 8

An SAP system on AWS needs to send alerts when the CPU utilization of the application server exceeds 90% for more than 5 minutes. Which AWS service should be used to set up this monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the correct service because it can monitor CPU utilization metrics for EC2 instances and trigger alarms based on thresholds. You can configure a CloudWatch alarm to evaluate the CPUUtilization metric over a 5-minute period and send notifications via Amazon SNS when the 90% threshold is breached.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Question 9

A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application that runs on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The application requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 5 seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. Which RDS deployment option meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

A Multi-AZ deployment with synchronous replication.. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments with synchronous replication provide automatic failover to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone, ensuring data is committed to both primary and standby before acknowledging a write. This achieves an RPO of effectively zero (less than 5 seconds) and an RTO typically under 1 minute, meeting the stated requirements.

Answer

A single-AZ deployment with cross-Region automated backups.

Answer

A single-AZ deployment with a standby instance manually promoted.

Answer

A Multi-AZ deployment with a Read Replica in a different Region.

Question 10

A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for its SAP HANA database on AWS. The primary site is in us-east-1, and the DR site is in us-west-2. Which TWO actions are required to enable HANA System Replication (HSR) across AWS Regions? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Set up a VPN or Direct Connect connection between the Regions for secure, low-latency communication.. Options B and C are correct. Option B is correct because HSR requires low-latency network connectivity between the primary and DR sites, which can be provided by VPN or Direct Connect. Option C is correct because for cross-region HSR, asynchronous replication mode is required since synchronous replication would introduce unacceptable latency over long distances. Option A is incorrect because EBS snapshots are not used for HSR; HSR uses log replication. Option D is incorrect because S3 Cross-Region Replication is not used for HANA data files; HSR replicates log volumes. Option E is incorrect because HSR is a database-level replication, not an application-level load balancer.

Answer

Enable cross-Region replication of EBS snapshots.

Answer

Use S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy HANA data files.

Answer

Deploy an Application Load Balancer in front of the HANA instances in both Regions.

Question 11

Which THREE considerations are important when designing a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for SAP on AWS?

Accepted Answer

Copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to the DR Region. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) must be copied to the DR Region to ensure that the exact EC2 instance configuration, including the operating system, SAP application binaries, and any custom patches, is available for recovery. Without copying AMIs, you cannot launch identical instances in the DR Region, which is essential for a consistent SAP environment.

Answer

Use EBS snapshots in the same Region for recovery

Answer

Deploy all SAP resources in a single AWS Region

Question 12

An SAP system is running on AWS with an SAP HANA database. The administrator needs to back up the HANA database to Amazon S3. Which AWS service or feature should be used to perform efficient incremental backups?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup with the SAP HANA backup plan. AWS Backup with the SAP HANA backup plan is correct because it provides native integration for SAP HANA databases, enabling automated, incremental, and log backups directly to Amazon S3. It uses the SAP HANA Backint agent to stream backup data to S3, supporting efficient incremental backups by only transferring changed data blocks since the last full or incremental backup, which minimizes storage and network costs.

Answer

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway with volume gateway

Answer

Amazon EBS snapshots of the HANA data volumes

Question 13

A company runs SAP ERP on AWS using a Multi-AZ RDS for SAP HANA database. The operations team needs to automate the rotation of the database master password. Which AWS service should be used to securely store and rotate the password?

Accepted Answer

AWS Secrets Manager. AWS Secrets Manager, is the correct choice because it is designed to securely store secrets and provides built-in capabilities to automatically rotate credentials for supported services like RDS. Option A (Systems Manager Parameter Store) can store secrets but does not natively support automatic rotation of RDS passwords. Option C (CloudHSM) is a hardware security module used for key management, not password rotation. Option D (IAM) manages user permissions and policies, not database passwords.

Answer

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

Answer

AWS CloudHSM

Answer

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Question 14

A company is using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate an SAP HANA database from on-premises to Amazon RDS for SAP HANA. The migration task fails with the error shown. Which step should the administrator take to resolve this?

Accepted Answer

Modify the DMS task to include character set conversion settings.. The error indicates a character set mismatch between the source and target databases. AWS DMS can handle character set conversion if configured correctly. By modifying the DMS task to include character set conversion settings, the administrator can resolve the mismatch without altering the source or creating a new instance. Option A is incorrect because changing the source database character set is unnecessary and could impact other applications. Option C is incorrect because creating a new RDS instance is overkill; the issue lies in the DMS task configuration. Option D is incorrect because AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is for server-level migration, not database migration.

Answer

Change the source database character set to ISO-8859-1.

Answer

Create a new RDS instance with the correct character set.

Answer

Use AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) instead of DMS.

Question 15

An SAP administrator needs to ensure high availability for SAP NetWeaver ABAP stack on AWS. Which three components should be configured in a multi-AZ active/passive cluster? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Enqueue Replication Server (ERS).. The Enqueue Replication Server (ERS) is a critical component in an SAP NetWeaver ABAP stack active/passive cluster because it replicates the lock table from the primary ASCS instance to the standby node. In a multi-AZ setup, this ensures that if the primary ASCS fails, the standby can take over with minimal disruption, as the lock state is preserved. Without ERS, a failover would require all locked resources to be released, causing data inconsistencies or application errors.

Answer

SAP Gateway.

Answer

Dialog instances.

Question 16

An SAP Basis team is migrating an SAP Business Suite system to AWS. The system has a large number of background jobs and requires consistent performance for batch processing. Which Amazon EC2 instance type is most suitable for this workload?

Accepted Answer

z1d.xlarge. The z1d.xlarge instance is most suitable because it offers a high baseline clock speed of up to 4.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost, which is critical for SAP Business Suite batch processing workloads that are CPU-bound and sensitive to single-threaded performance. SAP background jobs often require consistent, high-frequency CPU performance to meet batch window SLAs, and the z1d family is specifically designed for such high-performance, memory-intensive SAP workloads on AWS.

Answer

i3.2xlarge

Answer

g4dn.xlarge

Answer

t3.large

Question 17

A company runs its SAP ERP system on AWS. The SAP application servers are in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The SAP HANA database runs on a single EC2 instance in us-east-1a. The database instance has an Elastic IP and uses EBS io1 volumes with 5000 provisioned IOPS. During a recent deployment, the company experienced a complete outage when the Availability Zone us-east-1a became unavailable due to a power failure. The database was unavailable for 6 hours until the zone recovered. The company wants to implement a highly available architecture that can automatically recover from an AZ failure with minimal data loss. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 15 minutes and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 30 minutes. What should the company do?

Accepted Answer

Set up HANA System Replication with synchronous replication to a secondary instance in us-east-1b and configure automatic takeover.. HANA System Replication with synchronous replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone (us-east-1b) provides automatic takeover, meeting the RPO of 15 minutes (synchronous replication ensures no data loss) and RTO of 30 minutes (automatic failover). Option B is wrong because EBS snapshots every 15 minutes cannot guarantee RPO and RTO; restore time from snapshots often exceeds 30 minutes, and cross-region copying adds latency. Option C is wrong because scaling within the same AZ does not address AZ failure; the single point of failure remains. Option D is wrong because Amazon RDS for SAP HANA does not exist; HANA is not supported on RDS. The correct architecture requires HANA System Replication across AZs.

Answer

Take EBS snapshots every 15 minutes and copy them to another region.

Answer

Move the HANA database to a larger instance in the same Availability Zone and increase IOPS to 10000.

Answer

Migrate the HANA database to Amazon RDS for SAP HANA with Multi-AZ enabled.

Question 18

A company is running SAP HANA on AWS with a single Availability Zone (AZ). They want to improve high availability (HA) by deploying across multiple AZs. Which THREE components must be configured to support a multi-AZ SAP HANA HA setup? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Elastic Load Balancer (ALB or NLB) for the SAP application tier. To achieve multi-AZ high availability for SAP HANA on AWS, three core components are required. First, SAP HANA System Replication must be configured to replicate data synchronously or asynchronously across AZs, ensuring database failover capability. Second, a shared file system (e.g., Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP or Amazon EFS) is needed for directories like /sapmnt and /usr/sap/trans so that all application servers can access consistent files after failover. Third, an Elastic Load Balancer (ALB or NLB) distributes traffic to SAP application servers across AZs, enabling automatic failover at the application tier. Option A (Route 53 health checks) is a DNS-level component that can support failover but is not a direct requirement for the multi-AZ HA architecture itself; it is often used in conjunction but not considered a core component. Option C (CloudFront) is a CDN service and has no role in SAP HA.

Answer

Amazon Route 53 health checks for automatic failover

Answer

Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the application servers

Question 19

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing performance issues during peak hours. The operations team notices that the EBS volumes are consistently showing high queue depth. What should they do to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Provision more IOPS on the EBS volumes.. High EBS queue depth indicates that the volumes are not keeping up with IO demand, and provisioning more IOPS directly addresses this. Option A is incorrect: changing the EC2 instance type may improve available EBS bandwidth (throughput), but it does not provision additional IOPS; queue depth is primarily an IOPS issue. Option C is incorrect: switching to Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) is optimized for sequential throughput, not for high IOPS or low latency, so it would likely worsen queue depth for typical SAP workloads. Option D is incorrect: increasing EBS volume size can increase baseline IOPS for gp2/gp3 volumes, but that increase is indirect and often insufficient; the direct remedy for high queue depth is to provision more IOPS.

Answer

Change the EC2 instance type to a larger one.

Answer

Change the EBS volume type to Throughput Optimized HDD (st1).

Answer

Increase the size of the EBS volumes.

Question 20

A company runs its SAP application on EC2 instances in a private subnet. The SAP application needs to access an on-premises database through a VPN connection. The company wants to improve network performance and reduce latency between the SAP application and the on-premises database. Which action should the company take?

Accepted Answer

Set up AWS Direct Connect between the VPC and on-premises data center.. AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network connection from on-premises to AWS, offering lower and consistent latency compared to VPN connections that traverse the internet. Option B is incorrect because increasing VPN bandwidth does not reduce latency; latency is primarily affected by distance and internet routing. Option C is incorrect because VPC Peering is used to connect two VPCs, not to connect a VPC to an on-premises network. Option D is incorrect because a NAT Gateway enables outbound internet access from private subnets and does not provide connectivity to on-premises databases.

Answer

Increase the VPN tunnel bandwidth to 10 Gbps.

Answer

Create a VPC Peering connection to the on-premises network.

Answer

Add a NAT Gateway to the private subnet.