PAS-C01 Quick Quiz — 10 Questions

Question 1

An SAP system on AWS experiences intermittent performance issues. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU credit usage on the t3.large EC2 instance hosting the SAP application. The instance is configured as a 'standard' placement group. What is the MOST likely cause and recommended action?

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

Accepted Answer

The burstable instance is exhausting its CPU credits. Change to a non-burstable instance.. The t3.large is a burstable instance that earns CPU credits when idle and spends them when active. SAP applications often have sustained CPU demands that can exhaust the credit balance, causing performance throttling. Switching to a non-burstable instance (e.g., m5.large) provides consistent baseline CPU performance without credit-based limitations.

Answer

The instance size is too small. Move to a larger t3 instance.

Answer

The placement group is causing network bottlenecks. Move to a cluster placement group.

Answer

The EBS volume is not provisioned with enough IOPS. Increase the volume size.

Question 2

A company is deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the database and application servers are in the same placement group to minimize latency. However, the instance types required for the HANA database are not available in the same placement group due to insufficient capacity. What should the company do to maintain low latency?

Accepted Answer

Use a spread placement group instead of a cluster placement group.. A spread placement group is the correct choice because it spreads instances across distinct underlying hardware, reducing the risk of correlated failures while still keeping them in the same Availability Zone to minimize latency. Unlike a cluster placement group, which requires all instances to be on the same rack and can suffer from capacity constraints, a spread placement group does not enforce a single rack placement, so it can accommodate different instance types even when the cluster placement group lacks capacity. This ensures low latency for SAP S/4HANA communication between database and application servers without violating placement group constraints.

Answer

Place all instances in the same Availability Zone without a placement group.

Answer

Use a different instance type for the database that is available in the placement group.

Answer

Place the database in a different AWS Region and use AWS Direct Connect.

Question 3

An SAP administrator runs the commands above to inspect the volumes attached to an EC2 instance that hosts an SAP HANA database. The database log files are stored on /dev/sdf. What is a potential issue with this configuration?

Accepted Answer

The log volume uses gp3, which may not provide enough IOPS for HANA log writes.. Gp3 volumes may not provide sufficient IOPS for HANA log writes, which require high IOPS and low latency. Options B, C, and D are incorrect: /dev/sdf is a standard device name, DeleteOnTermination=false is fine for persistence, and encryption is not shown to be an issue.

Answer

The log volume is attached as /dev/sdf, which is not a standard device name for HANA.

Answer

The root volume will be deleted on termination, causing data loss.

Answer

The log volume is not encrypted.

Question 4

A company runs SAP on AWS and is experiencing high latency for database queries after moving the SAP HANA database to a larger instance type. CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volume queue length is consistently high. What is the most likely cause of the latency?

Accepted Answer

The EBS volume does not have enough provisioned IOPS.. A consistently high EBS volume queue length indicates that the volume is receiving more I/O requests than it can process, causing requests to queue up. Since the SAP HANA database was moved to a larger instance type, the workload likely demands more IOPS than the EBS volume is provisioned for, leading to throttling and increased latency. Option C correctly identifies that insufficient provisioned IOPS is the most likely cause.

Answer

The instance's network bandwidth is saturated.

Answer

The instance's CPU is under-provisioned.

Answer

The EBS volume is not encrypted.

Question 5

An SAP system uses an NFS share from an EFS file system for transport files. Recently, the transport directory performance has degraded. Which change would most likely improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Enable Provisioned Throughput on the EFS file system.. Using Provisioned Throughput on EFS ensures consistent performance regardless of file system size. Option A is wrong because increasing burst credits only helps temporarily. Option C is wrong because FSx for Lustre is for high-performance computing, not general purpose NFS. Option D is wrong because moving to S3 would require application changes.

Answer

Increase the burst credit balance by creating more files.

Answer

Migrate the transport directory to Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 with an NFS mount via AWS Storage Gateway.

Question 6

An SAP Basis administrator is migrating an SAP ERP system from an on-premises environment to AWS. The system uses an SAP HANA database. The migration must have minimal downtime. The administrator plans to use SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to synchronize data to an AWS HANA instance. However, the network latency between on-premises and AWS is consistently around 50 ms. What should the administrator do to ensure that HSR can maintain synchronization without impacting source system performance?

Accepted Answer

Configure HSR in asynchronous mode with full sync disabled to avoid affecting source transaction performance.. With 50 ms network latency, synchronous replication would block source transactions while waiting for acknowledgment from the target, severely impacting performance. Asynchronous mode with full sync disabled allows HSR to send log buffers without waiting for the target to confirm, ensuring source system performance is unaffected while still maintaining eventual consistency for migration.

Answer

Use synchronous replication with a lower sync timeout setting to avoid blocking.

Answer

Keep synchronous replication but increase the replication timeout value in the HANA global.ini file.

Answer

Enable HANA delta merge operations during replication to reduce the amount of data transferred.

Question 7

A company runs SAP Business Suite on AWS. They plan to use the SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) connector to automate system copy and relocation. What is a prerequisite for using the AWS LaMa connector?

Accepted Answer

An IAM role with permissions for EC2, EBS, and CloudFormation actions. The AWS LaMa connector automates SAP system copy and relocation by orchestrating EC2, EBS, and CloudFormation actions. An IAM role with permissions for these services is required so that LaMa can programmatically manage infrastructure resources (e.g., stop/start instances, snapshot volumes, create CloudFormation stacks) without manual intervention. This role is assumed by the LaMa connector when executing workflows.

Answer

An EC2 Auto Scaling group configured for the SAP application tier

Answer

AWS Systems Manager managed instances for all SAP servers

Answer

SSH keys for all SAP instances to allow LaMa to connect

Question 8

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the database can be restored to any point in time within the last 48 hours with minimal data loss. Which backup strategy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Schedule daily full backups and hourly incremental log backups to Amazon S3 using Backint.. SAP HANA supports Backint integration with Amazon S3 for log backups, enabling point-in-time recovery (PITR) with minimal data loss. Daily full backups combined with hourly incremental log backups ensure that any transaction committed within the last 48 hours can be restored, meeting the RPO requirement of minimal data loss.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS snapshots every 6 hours.

Answer

Use AWS Backup with a daily backup plan.

Answer

Take weekly full backups and daily differential backups to Amazon S3.

Question 9

An SAP system on AWS experiences intermittent performance issues. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU credit usage on the t3.large EC2 instance hosting the SAP application. The instance is configured as a 'standard' placement group. What is the MOST likely cause and recommended action?

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

Accepted Answer

The network ACLs are blocking the traffic.. Network ACLs are stateless and must explicitly allow both inbound and outbound traffic on ephemeral ports. If the outbound rules for the SCS subnet's NACL do not allow return traffic on high ports (e.g., 1024–65535), or if the application servers' subnet NACL blocks inbound traffic from the SCS instance, connections will intermittently fail. Security groups are stateful and automatically allow return traffic, but NACLs are not, making them the likely culprit for intermittent connectivity across different Availability Zones.

Answer

The route tables do not have a route for the SCS subnet.

Answer

The Internet Gateway is misconfigured.

Answer

The VPC peering connection is not established correctly.

Question 10

A company is migrating its SAP HANA database to AWS. Which instance type is specifically designed for SAP HANA and certified for production workloads?

Accepted Answer

x1e.xlarge. The x1e.xlarge instance is part of the AWS X1e family, which is specifically designed for memory-intensive workloads like SAP HANA and is certified by SAP for production deployments. SAP HANA requires large memory footprints and high memory-to-vCPU ratios, which the X1e instances provide with up to 3,904 GiB of memory and 128 vCPUs, meeting SAP's certification requirements.

Answer

c5.xlarge

Answer

r5.xlarge

Answer

t3.xlarge