PAS-C01 Technology Practice Test 10 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is using SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) to automate the provisioning and decommissioning of SAP application servers in an AWS environment. The SAP systems are deployed on EC2 instances using Amazon EBS volumes. The operations team has observed that when LaMa triggers a scale-in operation to remove an application server, the instance is terminated, but the associated EBS volumes (including the root volume) are not deleted, resulting in orphaned volumes and increasing storage costs. The team wants to ensure that EBS volumes are automatically deleted when an instance is terminated, especially during LaMa-driven operations. Which solution should the team implement?

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

Accepted Answer

Set the 'Delete on Termination' attribute to 'True' on all EBS volumes attached to the instance when it is launched by LaMa.. The 'Delete on Termination' attribute, when set to true, ensures that EBS volumes are deleted when the instance is terminated. This is the direct and native AWS mechanism to prevent orphaned volumes. LaMa provisions instances via AWS APIs, and if the launch template or instance configuration sets this attribute, the volumes will be cleaned up automatically.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policy to delete volumes that are not attached to a running instance.

Answer

Create an AWS Lambda function that is triggered by EC2 instance termination events to delete unattached EBS volumes.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor TerminateInstances events and trigger an AWS Step Function workflow to delete the volumes.

Question 2

An SAP application running on an EC2 instance is experiencing high latency during peak hours. The instance is in a private subnet with a NAT Gateway for outbound internet. Which action would most effectively reduce latency for SAP users?

Accepted Answer

Increase the EC2 instance size to a larger type with more CPU and memory.. Increasing the EC2 instance size to a larger type with more CPU and memory directly addresses the root cause of high latency during peak hours for an SAP application: resource contention. SAP is compute and memory-intensive; when the instance's vCPUs and RAM are saturated, request queuing and processing delays occur. A larger instance type provides more dedicated resources, reducing processing time per transaction and thus lowering latency for users.

Answer

Move the instance to a public subnet and assign a public IP address.

Answer

Replace the NAT Gateway with an Internet Gateway.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the instance.

Question 3

An SAP HANA database running on an EC2 instance is configured with multiple EBS volumes using RAID 0 for increased throughput. During a backup operation, the instance experiences a significant drop in I/O performance. Which solution would best address this without affecting ongoing backups?

Accepted Answer

Add more EBS volumes to the RAID 0 array to increase total I/O bandwidth.. Adding more EBS volumes to the RAID 0 array increases the total number of I/O channels available, which directly improves aggregate throughput and reduces per-volume I/O pressure during backup operations. This is because RAID 0 stripes data across all volumes, so additional volumes distribute the I/O load more evenly, mitigating the performance drop without interrupting the ongoing backup.

Answer

Use instance store volumes for the HANA data instead of EBS.

Answer

Use EBS snapshots for backup instead of file-level backup to reduce I/O load.

Answer

Reduce the number of EBS volumes to limit the RAID 0 penalty.

Question 4

An SAP system is running on EC2 with a single Availability Zone. The company needs to increase availability for the SAP application layer. Which is the most cost-effective and reliable approach?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with EC2 instances in two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer.. It distributes the SAP application layer across multiple EC2 instances in two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer, providing both high availability and fault tolerance. The Auto Scaling group ensures that the desired number of instances are maintained even if an instance or an entire AZ fails, while the ALB performs health checks and routes traffic only to healthy instances. This approach is cost-effective as it avoids over-provisioning and only scales based on demand, and it is reliable because it eliminates a single point of failure at the application tier.

Answer

Deploy a second EC2 instance in the same AZ and configure a Route 53 weighted routing policy.

Answer

Use a multi-AZ RDS database and keep the application on a single EC2 instance.

Answer

Use an EC2 instance in a different region and use Route 53 latency-based routing.

Question 5

An SAP ERP system on AWS is experiencing performance degradation. A review shows that the Amazon EBS volumes used for SAP transport directories are gp2 with high throughput but high latency. The SAP team needs improved I/O performance without changing the total storage capacity. Which action should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Change the volume type to io2 Block Express with provisioned IOPS.. Io2 Block Express volumes provide consistent, high-performance IOPS with sub-millisecond latency, which directly addresses the high-latency issue with gp2 volumes. This option improves I/O performance without changing storage capacity, as required by the SAP team. gp2 volumes suffer from burst bucket limitations, leading to high latency under sustained throughput, while io2 Block Express offers provisioned IOPS for predictable performance.

Answer

Change the volume type to gp3 and increase baseline IOPS.

Answer

Move the transport directories to instance store volumes.

Answer

Enable EBS throughput optimization on the EC2 instance.

Question 6

An SAP HANA system is deployed on AWS with a cluster of EC2 instances. The system requires high network throughput between the nodes for HANA scale-out. Which EC2 networking feature should be used?

Accepted Answer

Enable Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) support on the instances.. For SAP HANA scale-out clusters requiring high network throughput between EC2 instances, the correct feature is Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) support. ENA is a custom network interface optimized for high-throughput and low-latency packet processing, providing up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth on supported instance types. This directly meets the performance demands of HANA's inter-node communication.

Answer

Use multiple Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) per instance.

Answer

Use the Intel 82599 VF (ixgbevf) driver for enhanced networking.

Answer

Place all nodes in a cluster placement group.

Question 7

An SAP environment on AWS uses Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for shared storage. The system is experiencing high write latency. The storage administrator suspects the volume is not optimized for SAP workloads. Which configuration change would most likely reduce write latency?

Accepted Answer

Enable tiering policy to allow all data to be served from the SSD tier.. Enabling the tiering policy to allow all data to be served from the SSD tier ensures that all volume data resides on the high-performance SSD storage pool of the FSx for ONTAP file system. This eliminates read/write latency caused by accessing data from the capacity pool (Amazon S3), which has higher latency. For SAP workloads that require consistent low-latency I/O, keeping all data on the SSD tier is critical to reduce write latency.

Answer

Enable data compression on the volume.

Answer

Enable the capacity pool tiering to auto-tier cold data to Amazon S3.

Answer

Increase the size of the volume.

Question 8

A company is deploying an SAP BusinessObjects (BOBJ) platform on AWS. The platform consists of multiple web application servers, a CMS database, and an audit database. The company wants to ensure high availability for the CMS database using native SAP tools. Which AWS service should be used to host the CMS database to facilitate the use of SAP's native replication?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS is the correct choice because it provides managed relational database instances that support database engines like SQL Server and Oracle, which are compatible with SAP BusinessObjects CMS. RDS offers Multi-AZ deployments for high availability and can be used with SAP's native database replication methods such as log shipping or Always On availability groups, meeting the high availability requirement without managing the underlying infrastructure. DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and S3 are not relational databases and do not support the native replication tools needed for the CMS database.

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache

Answer

Amazon S3

Question 9

An SAP system administrator is troubleshooting an issue where the SAP HANA database is using more memory than expected on an Amazon EC2 instance. The instance type is an x1e.32xlarge with 3,904 GB of RAM. The HANA global.ini file includes the parameter 'memorymanager = global'. The administrator suspects that the HANA memory limit is not set correctly. What should the administrator check to confirm the memory limit?

Accepted Answer

Run the SQL statement 'SELECT * FROM M_SERVICE_MEMORY' and compare with 'SELECT VALUE FROM M_INIFILE WHERE KEY='global_allocation_limit'.'. When `memorymanager = global` is set in HANA, the effective memory limit is determined by the `global_allocation_limit` parameter in the `global.ini` file, not by the OS-level memory. Running `SELECT * FROM M_SERVICE_MEMORY` shows actual per-service memory usage, while `SELECT VALUE FROM M_INIFILE WHERE KEY='global_allocation_limit'` retrieves the configured limit. Comparing these two values directly confirms whether the memory limit is set correctly and if HANA is respecting it.

Answer

Review Amazon CloudWatch metrics for HANA memory usage.

Answer

Check the output of 'free -g' command on the EC2 instance.

Answer

Check the 'global_allocation_limit' parameter in the global.ini file.

Question 10

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.. Option B is correct because SAP HANA log backups capture every committed transaction, and running them every 5 minutes via Backint directly satisfies the 5-minute RPO required for point-in-time recovery. Option C is correct because the SAP HANA Backint agent (certified for AWS Backint) is the supported mechanism that streams both full data backups and log backups directly to Amazon S3, which is the mandated backup target. Together, B and C provide the continuous log stream and S3 storage needed to restore to any point in time within the 4-hour RTO. Option A is wrong because 2-hour log backups would leave up to 2 hours of data at risk, violating the 5-minute RPO. Option D is wrong because EBS snapshots are crash-consistent volume copies, not transaction-log-based backups, so they cannot deliver true PITR to a 5-minute granularity. Option E is wrong because SAP HANA System Replication is a high-availability/disaster-recovery mechanism, not a backup solution, and it does not store backups in Amazon S3.

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 11

A company wants to migrate its SAP ERP system from on-premises to AWS using the SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) sizing approach. The current on-premises system has a SAPS rating of 15,000. The company needs to select an EC2 instance type that can provide sufficient compute capacity. Which EC2 instance family is most suitable for SAP HANA workloads?

Accepted Answer

x1e. (x1e) is correct because SAP HANA is an in-memory database that requires high memory capacity, and the x1e instance family is memory-optimized and certified for SAP HANA workloads. Option A (c5) is wrong because it is compute-optimized and does not offer the memory required for HANA. Option B (p3) is wrong because it is GPU-optimized for machine learning, not memory-intensive databases. Option D (m5) is wrong because it is general-purpose and may not provide the dedicated memory or certification for HANA.

Answer

c5

Answer

p3

Answer

m5

Question 12

A company is running an SAP S/4HANA system on AWS. The system experiences high memory usage. The administrator wants to monitor the SAP HANA memory consumption and set alarms for when memory usage exceeds 85% of available memory. Which steps should the administrator take to achieve this? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Use SAP HANA SQL queries to monitor memory usage and publish custom metrics to CloudWatch.. Options B, C, and E are correct. B: SAP HANA provides detailed memory consumption metrics via SQL views, which can be queried and published as custom CloudWatch metrics. C: The CloudWatch agent collects OS-level memory metrics from the EC2 instance, enabling monitoring of overall system memory. E: A CloudWatch alarm can be set on the memory metric (either custom HANA metric or OS-level metric) with a threshold of 85% to trigger notifications via SNS. Option A is incorrect because SNS alone does not provide monitoring; it only delivers notifications. Option D is incorrect because CloudWatch Synthetics is used for endpoint monitoring, not for HANA memory metrics.

Answer

Configure an Amazon SNS topic to send email notifications when memory usage is high.

Answer

Use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to monitor HANA memory.

Question 13

A company is deploying SAP NetWeaver on AWS and needs to set up high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) and Enqueue Replication Server (ERS). The company uses a shared file system for the transport directory. Which components are essential for the HA setup? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

An internal Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to the ASCS instance.. An internal Application Load Balancer (ALB) is essential because it provides a virtual IP address and health checks for the SAP ASCS instance. In a multi-AZ HA setup, the ALB routes client traffic to the active ASCS instance and automatically fails over to the standby instance if the primary fails, ensuring continuous access to SAP Central Services.

Answer

Amazon S3 as the transport directory.

Answer

Both ASCS and ERS instances must run on the same EC2 instance.

Answer

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for the SAP database.

Question 14

A company is running SAP HANA on an EC2 instance. The administrator needs to ensure that the instance is resilient to an Availability Zone failure. Which actions should the administrator take? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Set up SAP HANA System Replication between instances in two Availability Zones.. Options C and D are correct because SAP HANA resilience to an Availability Zone failure requires SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) between two HANA instances running in different Availability Zones, so that the secondary instance can take over if the primary AZ fails. Option C correctly identifies SAP HANA System Replication as the mechanism, and option D correctly specifies deploying a second HANA instance in a different AZ and configuring replication, which together provide the required cross-AZ high availability. Option A is not appropriate because Auto Scaling is designed for stateless or horizontally scalable workloads and cannot automatically recover a stateful SAP HANA instance with its in-memory data and replication state. Option B is insufficient because CloudWatch monitoring and EC2 recovery actions only recover an instance within the same AZ or restart it, and do not protect against an entire AZ outage. Option E is not sufficient because daily EBS snapshots provide backup and point-in-time recovery, not automatic failover or near-zero RPO/RTO resilience against an AZ failure.

Answer

Configure Auto Scaling to automatically launch a new instance in another AZ.

Answer

Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor instance health and trigger a recovery.

Answer

Take daily EBS snapshots of the HANA data volume.

Question 15

An SAP administrator notices that the SAP HANA database on an r5.8xlarge instance is experiencing high swap usage. The instance has 256 GB of RAM. The SAP HANA memory usage is 200 GB. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The swap space is too small for the HANA workload. High swap usage on an r5.8xlarge instance with 256 GB RAM when SAP HANA is using 200 GB indicates that the system is actively paging memory to disk. SAP HANA is designed to run in-memory and should not normally use swap; however, if the swap space is too small to accommodate the overflow when memory pressure occurs, the system will exhibit high swap activity. The correct answer is C because insufficient swap space forces the kernel to thrash, causing high swap usage even when total memory is not fully exhausted.

Answer

The instance memory is exhausted

Answer

HANA is using huge pages instead of swap

Answer

Swap is disabled on the instance