PAS-C01 Technology Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is running SAP HANA on an EC2 instance with an EBS volume for data storage. The company wants to take daily snapshots of the EBS volume for backup. However, they are concerned about data consistency because the database is running. What should they do to ensure consistent snapshots?

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

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Backup with pre-scripts and post-scripts to quiesce SAP HANA.. Using AWS Backup with pre-scripts and post-scripts to quiesce SAP HANA ensures application-consistent snapshots by pausing I/O and flushing buffers before the snapshot. Option A is wrong because simply freezing the filesystem with fsfreeze does not guarantee database consistency without application-level quiescing. Option B is wrong because stopping the instance causes downtime and is unnecessary with proper quiescing. Option D is wrong because taking a snapshot while the database is running without preparation may result in an inconsistent state.

Answer

Freeze the filesystem using fsfreeze before taking the snapshot.

Answer

Stop the EC2 instance before taking the snapshot.

Answer

Take the snapshot while the database is running without any preparation.

Question 2

A company is migrating an SAP HANA database to AWS. Which TWO configurations are required to ensure high availability for the SAP HANA database in a multi-AZ setup?

Accepted Answer

Deploy SAP HANA System Replication across two Availability Zones.. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) is the native mechanism for replicating data between primary and secondary HANA instances across Availability Zones, ensuring synchronous or asynchronous data consistency. This is the foundational requirement for high availability in a multi-AZ setup, as it provides real-time data replication to a standby node in a different AZ.

Answer

Use a single EBS volume with synchronous replication to both nodes.

Answer

Configure EBS Multi-Attach to allow both HANA instances to share the same data volume.

Answer

Place an Application Load Balancer in front of the HANA database endpoints.

Question 3

An SAP application on AWS needs to be migrated to a new virtual private cloud (VPC). The SAP system uses SAProuter to connect to SAP support. Which THREE components must be updated or re-configured during the migration to ensure uninterrupted connectivity?

Accepted Answer

Update the Amazon Route 53 DNS records for the SAP application and database servers.. Updating Amazon Route 53 DNS records ensures that the SAP application and database servers can be reached using their new private or public IP addresses in the new VPC. Without this update, clients and SAP support connections via SAProuter would fail due to DNS resolution pointing to the old VPC's IPs, causing connectivity interruptions.

Answer

Adjust the S3 bucket policy to allow access from the new VPC.

Answer

Recreate IAM roles for the SAP application servers.

Question 4

A company runs its SAP ERP system on AWS using an SAP HANA database on a single EC2 instance. The system experiences intermittent performance degradation during peak hours. The operations team suspects CPU contention, as the instance type is an r5.4xlarge (16 vCPUs). When they check Amazon CloudWatch metrics, they notice that the CPU utilization averages 60%, but occasionally spikes to 100% for a few seconds. The team wants to improve performance without changing the instance type. They are considering using AWS Compute Optimizer or enabling T2/T3 unlimited. What is the MOST effective action to address the CPU spikes?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Global Accelerator to improve network performance and reduce CPU overhead.. AWS Global Accelerator improves network performance by routing traffic over the AWS global network, reducing latency and jitter. This reduces the CPU overhead incurred by the EC2 instance for handling network processing, which can help alleviate CPU spikes during peak hours. The other options are either ineffective or require changing the instance type, which the team wants to avoid.

Answer

Attach an Elastic Fabric Adapter to offload network processing from the CPU.

Answer

Upgrade the instance to a larger size in the r5 family, such as r5.8xlarge, to provide more CPU capacity.

Answer

Enable T3 unlimited on the instance to allow sustained high CPU performance.

Question 5

A company is running SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a high-availability setup using SAP HANA System Replication and a Pacemaker cluster. The cluster consists of two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, each with an EBS volume for HANA data. The cluster uses a virtual IP address (VIP) managed by the AWS Route 53 health check and failover mechanism. During a recent failover test, the secondary node took over as primary, but the application was unable to connect to the database for several minutes. The investigation reveals that the VIP did not update correctly. The company wants to ensure fast and reliable VIP failover. What should the team do to improve the failover time?

Accepted Answer

Place the SAP HANA database behind an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) and use the NLB's TCP health checks to route traffic to the active instance.. Using an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) as a database endpoint provides a static IP that can be redirected to the active HANA node. The NLB performs TCP health checks at layer 4 and can detect failure within seconds, rerouting traffic to the healthy secondary instance almost immediately. Option A is incorrect because increasing DNS TTL makes failover slower, not faster. Option B is incorrect because reassigning an Elastic IP requires API calls that can take tens of seconds. Option C is incorrect because even with a reduced health check interval and low TTL, DNS propagation still introduces delays, and Route 53 health checks are not as fast as NLB health checks.

Answer

Increase the DNS TTL to 300 seconds to reduce lookups and rely on the Pacemaker VIP update.

Answer

Assign an Elastic IP address to the active node and use a script to reassign it during failover.

Answer

Reduce the Route 53 health check interval to 10 seconds and lower the DNS TTL to 60 seconds.

Question 6

A company has deployed SAP BusinessObjects (BO) on AWS using a multi-tier architecture with a Windows-based application server and a SQL Server database hosted on Amazon RDS. The application server is behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that handles HTTPS traffic. Users report that sometimes they receive a '502 Bad Gateway' error when accessing the BO web interface. The error occurs intermittently and is not reproducible on demand. The operations team checks the ALB logs and sees that the target response time occasionally exceeds 120 seconds. The BO application has a default timeout of 60 seconds. The team also notices that the ALB idle timeout is set to 60 seconds. What is the most likely cause of the 502 errors?

Accepted Answer

Increase the idle timeout of the Application Load Balancer to 180 seconds.. The 502 errors occur because the ALB idle timeout (60 seconds) matches the BO application's default timeout (60 seconds), but the ALB logs show target response times occasionally exceed 120 seconds. When the ALB idle timeout expires before the backend completes its response, the ALB closes the connection and returns a 502 error. Increasing the ALB idle timeout to 180 seconds allows sufficient time for the backend to respond, preventing premature connection termination.

Answer

Place an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB to cache responses and reduce load.

Answer

Increase the max_connections parameter in the RDS SQL Server instance.

Answer

Increase the deregistration delay on the ALB target group to 300 seconds.

Question 7

A company is running SAP NetWeaver on AWS with an Oracle database on an EC2 instance. The database uses Oracle Data Guard for disaster recovery across Regions. The primary database is in us-east-1, and the standby is in us-west-2. The database size is 500 GB and the network link between Regions has about 100 Mbps throughput. During a recent disaster recovery drill, the failover to the standby took over 2 hours because the Data Guard redo logs were not fully applied. The team wants to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO). They are considering using Amazon S3 to store archived redo logs, increasing the bandwidth, or using a different replication method. What is the MOST effective action to reduce the RTO?

Accepted Answer

Increase the network bandwidth between the Regions to reduce redo log shipping lag.. Increasing the bandwidth between Regions will reduce the lag in redo log shipping, allowing the standby to apply logs more quickly and be ready faster. Option A is incorrect because storing archived logs on S3 still requires transferring them to the standby. Option B is incorrect because EBS replication does not apply to cross-Region scenarios. Option C is incorrect because ASM is a storage management layer, not a replication solution.

Answer

Configure the primary database to automatically archive redo logs to Amazon S3, and have the standby download them from S3.

Answer

Use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) to mirror data across Regions.

Answer

Replace Oracle Data Guard with Amazon EBS snapshot replication across Regions.

Question 8

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?

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 correct solution is to set the 'Delete on Termination' attribute to 'True' on all EBS volumes attached to the instance when it is launched by LaMa. This ensures that when the instance is terminated (e.g., during a LaMa scale-in operation), the EBS volumes are automatically deleted, preventing orphaned volumes. Option A is incorrect because Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is used for managing snapshot schedules, not for immediate deletion on termination. Option C is incorrect because while a Lambda function could delete volumes after termination, it adds complexity and may have timing issues; the simpler and more reliable method is to set the flag at launch. Option D is incorrect because CloudTrail logs API calls but does not directly perform actions; setting up Step Functions for this purpose is overly complex compared to the native 'Delete on Termination' attribute.

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 9

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 10

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 11

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 12

A company is running SAP on AWS and needs to migrate a large on-premises SAP HANA database to AWS with minimal downtime. Which approach is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Set up SAP HANA System Replication between the on-premises system and an EC2 instance running HANA in AWS.. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) is the native, low-latency replication mechanism designed for HANA databases, enabling near-continuous data synchronization between an on-premises system and an EC2 instance. This approach supports a controlled takeover with minimal downtime, as it replicates transactions in real time using log shipping or synchronous replication, making it the most suitable for large databases requiring minimal interruption.

Answer

Export the HANA database to a file, upload to S3, and import into a new HANA instance on EC2.

Answer

Use AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) to replicate the entire on-premises server to AWS.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to continuously replicate data to an Amazon RDS for SAP HANA instance.

Question 13

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 14

A company is planning to run SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the SAP system is backed up according to best practices. Which backup strategy is recommended?

Accepted Answer

Use EBS snapshots after quiescing the SAP system, combined with database backups to S3.. For SAP S/4HANA on AWS, the recommended backup strategy combines EBS snapshots taken after quiescing the SAP system (to ensure file system consistency) with database backups to Amazon S3. Quiescing the application ensures that all pending I/O operations are flushed and the file system is in a consistent state, preventing data corruption. Database backups to S3 provide a separate, application-consistent recovery point that can be used for point-in-time recovery, which is critical for SAP systems.

Answer

Use EBS snapshots of the data volumes without quiescing the application.

Answer

Store backup files on instance store volumes for quick recovery.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to take snapshots of the EC2 instance only.

Question 15

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.