PAS-C01 Mock Exam 73 — 25 Questions

Question 1

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing high latency between the application and database tiers. Both tiers are in the same VPC but in different Availability Zones. What is the most effective way to reduce latency?

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

Accepted Answer

Move both tiers into the same Availability Zone.. Placing both tiers in the same Availability Zone eliminates cross-AZ data transfer latency. AWS data transfer between AZs incurs additional latency compared to within the same AZ. Option B (adding an Application Load Balancer) would add network hops and potentially increase latency. Option C (increasing bandwidth) does not reduce latency; bandwidth affects throughput, not latency. Option D (AWS Direct Connect) is used for on-premises connectivity, not for communication within AWS.

Answer

Add an Application Load Balancer between tiers.

Answer

Increase the bandwidth of the EC2 instances.

Answer

Enable AWS Direct Connect.

Question 2

Which THREE considerations are important when designing an SAP HANA multi-node (scale-out) deployment on AWS? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use a cluster placement group for low-latency network.. A cluster placement group provides low-latency network connectivity between EC2 instances by placing them in a single Availability Zone with non-blocking, fully bisectional bandwidth. For SAP HANA multi-node (scale-out) deployments, this low-latency, high-throughput network is essential for the internal communication between nodes, as HANA relies on fast inter-node data exchange for distributed queries and replication.

Answer

Use EBS Multi-Attach to share volumes between nodes.

Answer

Use a single large EC2 instance with many vCPUs.

Question 3

A company runs a critical web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences intermittent high latency, and the operations team suspects that the load balancer is not distributing traffic evenly. Which configuration should the team check to confirm or rule out uneven traffic distribution?

Accepted Answer

Verify that cross-zone load balancing is enabled on the ALB. Uneven traffic distribution across EC2 instances behind an ALB is most commonly caused by cross-zone load balancing being disabled. By default, ALBs have cross-zone load balancing enabled, which distributes traffic evenly across all registered instances in all enabled Availability Zones. If it is disabled, each ALB node distributes traffic only to instances in its own Availability Zone, leading to imbalances when instance counts or capacities differ across zones. Verifying this setting directly addresses the suspected uneven distribution.

Answer

Configure slow start on the target group

Answer

Increase the deregistration delay on the target group

Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the target group

Question 4

A company needs to back up its SAP HANA database running on Amazon EC2. The database is 500 GB. What is the recommended approach for backups?

Accepted Answer

Use SAP HANA Studio to back up to an S3 bucket directly. Option A (automated backups) is not applicable for EC2 instances running SAP HANA. Option B (manual EBS snapshots) can lead to inconsistent backups and is not recommended. Option C (mysqldump) is for MySQL databases, not SAP HANA. The correct approach is to use SAP HANA Studio with the Backint agent to back up directly to an S3 bucket, which is a supported and recommended method for SAP HANA running on Amazon EC2.

Answer

Enable automated backups and configure the backup retention period

Answer

Create manual EBS snapshots of the RDS instance

Answer

Export the database using mysqldump and store the dump in S3

Question 5

An SAP system administrator wants to monitor the CPU and memory usage of SAP HANA database instances. Which AWS service should be used to collect and visualize these metrics?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Agent. The Amazon CloudWatch Agent can collect memory metrics from EC2 instances, including SAP HANA databases. Option A is wrong because CloudTrail is for API auditing, not metric collection. Option C is wrong because Systems Manager Run Command is for executing scripts, not continuous monitoring. Option D is wrong because standard CloudWatch metrics do not include memory usage by default; memory metrics require the CloudWatch Agent.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Systems Manager Run Command

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch metrics

Question 6

An SAP system administrator needs to ensure that all API calls made to AWS services by the SAP system are logged for security auditing. Which AWS service should be enabled?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail logs all API calls made to AWS services, enabling security auditing. Option A is incorrect because AWS Config tracks configuration changes, not API calls. Option B is incorrect because Amazon CloudWatch monitors performance metrics and logs, but does not log API calls specifically. Option C is incorrect because VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic metadata, not API calls.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer

VPC Flow Logs

Question 7

A company runs SAP on AWS and wants to automate the patching of SAP application servers. The servers are in an Auto Scaling group. Which THREE steps should be included in the automation?

Accepted Answer

Update the Auto Scaling group's launch configuration or launch template to use the new AMI.. Options A, B, and D are correct because the recommended approach for patching SAP application servers in an Auto Scaling group is to use immutable updates: create a new AMI with patches (B), update the launch configuration/template to reference the new AMI (A), and then perform an instance refresh to gradually replace instances (D). This minimizes downtime. Option C (using Systems Manager to patch running instances) is not recommended for Auto Scaling groups because it can lead to inconsistent state and doesn't benefit from the rolling update mechanism. Option E (terminating all instances at once) would cause downtime.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager to apply patches to running instances.

Answer

Terminate all existing instances at once.

Question 8

A company runs a critical SAP HANA database on an m5.24xlarge EC2 instance. The operations team notices that the database performance degrades during peak hours. Which AWS service should be used to identify whether the instance is experiencing CPU throttling due to CPU credit exhaustion?

Accepted Answer

Use CloudWatch to monitor the CPUUtilization metric.. CloudWatch CPUUtilization measures the actual CPU usage of the EC2 instance. For m5 instances, which are dedicated performance instances, there is no CPU credit concept, so monitoring CPUCreditBalance (option D) is irrelevant. The operations team can set a CloudWatch alarm on CPUUtilization to detect when CPU usage is high during peak hours, indicating potential performance degradation. Option A (CloudTrail) logs API calls, not performance metrics. Option B (Trusted Advisor) provides best practice recommendations but does not offer real-time CPU monitoring. Therefore, CloudWatch CPUUtilization is the appropriate service to identify CPU throttling issues.

Answer

Use CloudTrail to review the EC2 instance launch configuration.

Answer

Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check for instance performance issues.

Answer

Use CloudWatch to monitor the CPUCreditBalance metric.

Question 9

Your company runs an 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 with multiple EBS volumes. Recently, the database instance experienced a failure due to an underlying hardware issue, and you had to recover from an EBS snapshot. The recovery took longer than expected, and management wants to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO). What should you do to achieve a lower RTO for the HANA database?

Accepted Answer

Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone. SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone provides near-synchronous replication, enabling automatic failover in minutes. This significantly reduces RTO compared to recovering from EBS snapshots, which can take hours depending on volume size. Option D is correct because it directly addresses the need for faster recovery.

Answer

Create more frequent EBS snapshots and store them in Amazon S3

Answer

Increase the size of the EBS volumes and use Provisioned IOPS

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group for the database instance

Question 10

An SAP system is experiencing high disk I/O latency. The operations team checks the Amazon CloudWatch metrics and finds that the Average Queue Length for the EBS volumes is consistently above the recommended threshold. Which action should be taken to address this issue?

Accepted Answer

Increase the provisioned IOPS for the EBS volumes.. Increasing the provisioned IOPS for the EBS volumes directly increases the number of I/O operations the volume can handle, reducing the average queue length. Option A is incorrect because st1 volumes are optimized for throughput, not IOPS. Option C is incorrect because EBS encryption does not improve I/O performance and may introduce a slight overhead. Option D is incorrect because increasing volume size does not directly affect queue length; for gp2 volumes, it only increases baseline IOPS indirectly via burst credits, but it is not a reliable method to reduce queue length.

Answer

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

Answer

Enable EBS encryption to improve I/O performance.

Answer

Increase the volume size to improve I/O performance.

Question 11

A company is running an SAP HANA database on an EC2 instance. The operations team notices that the SAP application is responding slowly during peak hours. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU utilization and increased swap usage. Which combination of actions should the team take to resolve the performance issue?

Accepted Answer

Resize the EC2 instance to a larger instance type with more vCPUs and memory.. Increasing both vCPUs and memory addresses the high CPU utilization and high swap usage (indicating memory pressure). Option A is wrong because Auto Scaling horizontally adds instances, which is not appropriate for a single SAP HANA database that typically runs vertically. Option C is wrong because compute-optimized instances prioritize CPU over memory, but the issue also involves memory shortage (swap usage). Option D is wrong because adding EBS volumes and read replicas targets storage and read scaling, not CPU or memory bottlenecks.

Answer

Enable Auto Scaling for the EC2 instance to automatically add more instances.

Answer

Change the instance type to a compute-optimized instance to improve CPU performance.

Answer

Add more EBS volumes and increase the number of read replicas.

Question 12

A company is running an SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 instance. The storage is configured with multiple EBS volumes striped using LVM. The company wants to ensure the database performance is consistent and can detect potential bottlenecks. Which AWS service should be used to monitor the EBS volume metrics such as Average Queue Length and Throughput?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the correct service because it provides detailed, granular monitoring of EBS volume metrics such as Average Queue Length (AverageQueueLength) and Throughput (VolumeReadBytes/VolumeWriteBytes). These metrics are collected at 1-minute intervals by default for EBS volumes attached to Nitro-based EC2 instances, enabling you to detect performance bottlenecks like high queue depths or throughput saturation. CloudWatch also allows you to set alarms and create dashboards for proactive monitoring of SAP HANA database storage performance.

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Question 13

A company is migrating a legacy on-premises application to AWS. The application requires static IP addresses for its clients to whitelist. The migration strategy includes using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The clients require a fixed set of IP addresses to whitelist. Which solution meets the requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use a Network Load Balancer with Elastic IP addresses.. A Network Load Balancer (NLB) supports static IP addresses via Elastic IP (EIP) assignment per Availability Zone, which allows clients to whitelist a fixed set of IPs. The ALB, by contrast, does not support static IP assignment; its DNS name resolves to dynamic IPs that can change. Using an NLB with EIPs meets the requirement for a fixed whitelist while still distributing traffic to the ALB or directly to EC2 instances.

Answer

Use AWS Global Accelerator with the Application Load Balancer as an endpoint.

Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer and assign Elastic IP addresses to it.

Answer

Launch EC2 instances with Elastic IPs and place them behind a NAT Gateway.

Question 14

Which THREE of the following are valid strategies for disaster recovery (DR) of SAP workloads on AWS? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Pilot light environment with replicated data volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances in DR.. A pilot light DR strategy for SAP on AWS involves replicating data volumes (e.g., using EBS snapshots or storage replication) to a secondary region and keeping a minimal set of core services running. In a disaster, EC2 instances are launched and the replicated volumes are attached, allowing the SAP application stack to be started quickly. This approach balances cost and recovery time by avoiding a fully scaled environment during normal operations.

Answer

Warm standby with a fully scaled-down environment that is manually scaled up during DR.

Answer

Multi-site active-active with real-time replication and automatic failover.

Question 15

A company is migrating an SAP BusinessObjects system to AWS. The system includes a Central Management Server (CMS) and several processing servers. The CMS uses a SQL Server database. The company wants to use a managed database service on AWS to reduce operational overhead. The database size is 100 GB and is expected to grow 10% annually. The company requires automatic failover to a secondary Availability Zone with minimal downtime. Which AWS database service should the company use for the CMS database?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ deployment. Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ deployment is the correct choice because it provides a managed database service with automatic failover to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone, meeting the requirement for minimal downtime. Amazon Aurora does not support SQL Server compatibility; Aurora is MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible. Amazon EC2 with SQL Server installed is not a managed service, increasing operational overhead. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and not compatible with SQL Server, which requires a relational database.

Answer

Amazon EC2 with SQL Server installed

Answer

Amazon Aurora SQL Server

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Question 16

A company is migrating their SAP HANA database to AWS. The on-premises HANA system is 10 TB and runs on a physical server. They need to minimize the migration time and cannot afford more than 4 hours of downtime. The network bandwidth is limited to 500 Mbps. They decide to use AWS Snowball Edge to transfer the data. After copying the data to Snowball, they ship it to AWS. However, upon receiving the data, they find that the checksum verification fails. What should they do to resolve this issue and complete the migration within the downtime window?

Accepted Answer

Contact AWS Support to perform a remote data verification and import. If the checksum verification fails, AWS Support can perform a remote data verification and potentially import the data without needing to reship the Snowball, which would exceed the 4-hour downtime window. Option A is incorrect because re-copying and reshipping would take days, not fitting the downtime requirement. Option B is incorrect because even incremental transfer via DMS over a 500 Mbps link would take too long for 10 TB. Option D is incorrect because ordering Direct Connect can take weeks to provision, which also exceeds the allowed downtime.

Answer

Re-copy the data to a new Snowball and reship

Answer

Use AWS DMS over the existing network to transfer the data incrementally

Answer

Order an AWS Direct Connect connection to increase bandwidth

Question 17

An SAP environment on AWS consists of several EC2 instances running SAP NetWeaver and a separate HANA database instance. The system is using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to the web dispatchers. Recently, the ALB health checks are failing for one of the web dispatchers, causing it to be taken out of service. You investigate and find that the web dispatcher is running and can be reached directly via its private IP. The health check is configured to check the /sap/public/health endpoint. What is the most likely reason for the health check failure?

Accepted Answer

The web dispatcher is configured to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS, and the health check is using HTTP.. The ALB health check expects a 200 OK response. If the web dispatcher is configured to redirect HTTP to HTTPS, the health check (which uses HTTP) receives a redirect (3xx) response instead of 200, causing the ALB to mark it as unhealthy. Option A is incorrect because if the security group blocked traffic from the ALB, direct access via private IP would also be blocked. Option C is incorrect because slow responses would cause timeout, not a redirect. Option D is incorrect because a single instance typically has one IP address for the web dispatcher service.

Answer

The security group for the web dispatcher does not allow traffic from the ALB.

Answer

The web dispatcher instance is running out of memory, causing slow responses.

Answer

The web dispatcher has multiple IP addresses and the health check targets the wrong one.

Question 18

A company is running an SAP S/4HANA system on AWS. The system uses an SAP HANA database with a current size of 1.5 TB. The company wants to implement a backup strategy that allows point-in-time recovery (PITR) with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 4 hours. The backup must be stored in Amazon S3. Which combination of steps should the company take? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Configure log backup to run every 5 minutes using Backint.. The correct options are B and C. Option B configures log backups every 5 minutes using Backint, achieving the required RPO of 5 minutes. Option C installs the Backint agent to stream both full and log backups to Amazon S3, meeting the storage requirement. Option A is incorrect because a 2-hour log backup interval exceeds the 5-minute RPO. Option D is incorrect because EBS snapshots provide volume-level recovery, not point-in-time database recovery. Option E is incorrect because SAP HANA System Replication is for high availability, not backup.

Answer

Schedule full backups every 12 hours and log backups every 2 hours.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS snapshots of the HANA data volume as the primary backup mechanism.

Answer

Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a second instance in another Availability Zone.

Question 19

A company runs SAP BusinessObjects on AWS. The system includes a web application server and a CMS database on separate EC2 instances. The operations team receives alerts that the CMS database server's EBS volume is approaching its maximum capacity. The volume is a gp3 EBS volume with 3000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput. Upon investigation, the team finds that the volume is 90% full and write performance has degraded. The application is experiencing slow response times. What should the team do to resolve the issue without downtime?

Accepted Answer

Expand the EBS volume size and extend the file system.. Expanding the EBS volume size increases both capacity and, for gp3, the baseline throughput (since gp3 throughput scales with volume size up to a maximum), which can resolve the capacity issue and improve write performance. This operation can be performed online without downtime. Option A is incorrect because instance store volumes are ephemeral and not suitable for persistent database data; migrating would also require downtime. Option B is incorrect because while io2 Block Express offers higher performance, it is not necessary for this scenario and may increase cost unnecessarily; the primary issue is capacity, which can be addressed by expanding the existing volume. Option C is incorrect because increasing only IOPS and throughput does not add storage capacity; the volume is 90% full, so capacity must also be increased.

Answer

Move the database to an instance store volume for better performance.

Answer

Migrate the database to an io2 Block Express volume with higher performance.

Answer

Increase the IOPS and throughput of the existing volume.

Question 20

An SAP administrator needs to set up disaster recovery for an SAP system on AWS. Which TWO AWS services can be used to replicate data across regions?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EBS snapshots copied to another region. Amazon EBS snapshots can be copied to another AWS region, providing a reliable mechanism for disaster recovery of SAP systems by creating point-in-time backups of critical volumes. This allows the SAP administrator to restore the system in a different region if the primary region fails, ensuring data durability and recoverability.

Answer

Amazon CloudFront

Answer

Amazon EFS replication

Answer

Amazon RDS read replicas in another region