PAS-C01 Technology Practice Test 18 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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.)

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

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 2

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.. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) provides synchronous or asynchronous replication of the HANA database to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). This ensures that if the primary AZ fails, the secondary instance can be promoted to primary with minimal data loss, meeting the resilience requirement. HSR is the native SAP mechanism for disaster recovery across AZs and is fully supported on AWS.

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 3

A company runs a critical SAP application on AWS. The SAP team needs to reduce network latency between application servers and the database. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Placement Groups (cluster). Placement Groups with a cluster placement strategy are designed to provide the lowest possible network latency and highest throughput by ensuring that EC2 instances are placed in a single Availability Zone with low-latency, high-bandwidth networking. For a critical SAP application where the application servers and database must communicate with minimal latency, a cluster placement group is the correct choice because it leverages non-blocking, fully bisectional bandwidth between instances, reducing network hops and jitter.

Answer

Amazon Route 53

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator

Answer

VPC Peering

Question 4

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

Question 5

A company is migrating an SAP ERP system to AWS and needs to ensure high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) and Enqueue Replication Server (ERS). The solution must use a shared file system for the SAP transport directory. Which combination of AWS services should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS for the transport directory and two EC2 instances with a floating IP. SAP ASCS and ERS require a highly available shared file system for the SAP transport directory, and Amazon EFS provides a fully managed NFS file system that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances across Availability Zones. The floating IP (using AWS Elastic IP or a secondary private IP) allows the ASCS and ERS services to fail over transparently between the two EC2 instances, meeting the high availability requirements without relying on a single point of failure.

Answer

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for the transport directory

Answer

Amazon S3 as the transport directory with two application servers

Answer

Amazon EBS volumes attached to both ASCS and ERS instances

Question 6

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing intermittent connectivity issues between the application server and the HANA database. The application team confirms the database is healthy. Which AWS service should be used to analyze network traffic between the two instances?

Accepted Answer

VPC Flow Logs. VPC Flow Logs capture IP traffic information for network interfaces, allowing analysis of network traffic between the application server and HANA database to identify dropped packets or blocked traffic. AWS Config records resource configurations (not network traffic), CloudTrail logs API calls (not network flows), and CloudWatch Logs aggregates application and system logs (not network-level traffic).

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Question 7

A company wants to automate the installation of SAP HANA on AWS using CloudFormation. Which AWS resource should be used to run a script that downloads and installs SAP HANA software on an EC2 instance after the instance is launched?

Accepted Answer

AWS::CloudFormation::CreationPolicy with cfn-signal. AWS CloudFormation's CreationPolicy with cfn-signal allows you to control the stack creation process by waiting for a signal from the EC2 instance after it has completed its configuration. When using a CreationPolicy, CloudFormation will not mark the resource as created until it receives a signal (e.g., via cfn-signal) indicating that the installation script has finished. This is ideal for automating SAP HANA installations where you need to ensure the software is fully installed before proceeding. Option A is incorrect because AWS::CloudFormation::Init (cfn-init) is used to install packages, create files, and run commands during instance launch, but it does not provide a mechanism for CloudFormation to wait for the completion of long-running scripts; it runs as part of the user data and returns immediately. Option C is incorrect because while a Lambda function can be triggered by EC2 state changes, it does not integrate directly with CloudFormation's stack creation process to signal completion. You would need additional custom logic to send a signal back to CloudFormation, making it less straightforward than using CreationPolicy. Option D is incorrect because EC2 User Data runs once at instance launch, but CloudFormation does not inherently wait for user data scripts to finish. Without a CreationPolicy or similar mechanism, CloudFormation will proceed to the next resource immediately after launching the instance, even if the script is still running.

Answer

AWS::CloudFormation::Init (cfn-init)

Answer

AWS Lambda function triggered by EC2 state change

Answer

EC2 User Data

Question 8

An SAP system running on AWS is configured with a Multi-AZ RDS for SAP HANA database. The primary database fails, but the automatic failover does not occur. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

Multi-AZ is not supported for RDS for SAP HANA. Multi-AZ for RDS for SAP HANA is not supported; RDS for SAP HANA does not have Multi-AZ capability. Option A is incorrect because Multi-AZ is not a paid option; it incurs costs but is not disabled by billing. Option B is incorrect because RDS for HANA does not use EBS snapshots for replication. Option D is incorrect because RDS does not use Elastic IPs.

Answer

The Multi-AZ configuration was not paid for

Answer

The standby instance was not configured with EBS snapshots

Answer

The primary instance does not have an Elastic IP attached

Question 9

An SAP administrator needs to back up SAP HANA database to Amazon S3. Which AWS service or feature should be used to automate this backup?

Accepted Answer

SAP HANA Backup and Recovery with Backint. The SAP HANA Backup and Recovery feature can back up directly to S3 via the Backint agent. Option A is incorrect because EBS snapshots capture the entire volume, not just the HANA database, and are not SAP HANA-aware. Option C is incorrect because AWS Backup supports some databases but not SAP HANA directly. Option D is incorrect because S3 Lifecycle policies manage object retention, not backup initiation.

Answer

Amazon EBS snapshots

Answer

AWS Backup

Answer

S3 Lifecycle policies

Question 10

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the system can automatically recover from an Availability Zone failure. The solution must use synchronous replication for zero data loss. Which AWS architecture meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

SAP HANA System Replication with synchronous replication. SAP HANA System Replication with synchronous replication across Availability Zones ensures zero data loss and automatic failover. Option A is incorrect because EBS snapshots are asynchronous and do not provide zero data loss. Option B is incorrect because Multi-AZ RDS is not supported for HANA. Option C is incorrect because cluster placement groups are within a single AZ and do not provide cross-AZ failover.

Answer

EBS snapshots taken every 5 minutes

Answer

Multi-AZ RDS for SAP HANA

Answer

Cluster placement group spanning two AZs

Question 11

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing slow performance. The SAP team suspects that the Amazon EBS volumes used for the database are not providing sufficient IOPS. Which step should be taken to identify the bottleneck?

Accepted Answer

Monitor the EBS volume metrics in CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch provides detailed metrics for EBS volumes, including `VolumeReadOps`, `VolumeWriteOps`, `VolumeQueueLength`, and `VolumeThroughputPercentage`. By monitoring these metrics, you can directly determine whether the EBS volume is reaching its provisioned IOPS limit or experiencing queue buildup, which would confirm an IOPS bottleneck. This is the most direct and actionable step to diagnose insufficient IOPS for the SAP database.

Answer

Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check performance

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs to analyze network traffic

Answer

Review the AWS Config rules for EBS

Question 12

Refer to the exhibit. An SAP administrator is reviewing the block device mappings of an EC2 instance. What is the impact of the DeleteOnTermination setting on /dev/sdf?

Accepted Answer

The volume will persist after the instance is terminated. The DeleteOnTermination attribute controls whether an Amazon EBS volume is automatically deleted when the associated EC2 instance is terminated. For the volume at /dev/sdf, the setting is 'false', meaning the volume will persist after the instance is terminated. This is a common configuration for data volumes that need to be retained for backup, migration, or reuse purposes.

Answer

The volume will be automatically deleted after 30 days

Answer

The volume will be deleted when the instance is terminated

Answer

The volume is a snapshot of the root volume

Question 13

Refer to the exhibit. An SAP administrator is creating an IAM policy for launching EC2 instances. Which instance type will the policy allow?

Accepted Answer

r5.4xlarge and r5.8xlarge. The IAM policy allows ec2:RunInstances with a condition that restricts instance types to those matching 'r5.4xlarge' or 'r5.8xlarge' via a ForAllValues:StringEquals condition on ec2:InstanceType. Since the condition uses a wildcard-free list, only the explicitly listed instance types are permitted. Options A, B, and C are not in the list, so they are denied.

Answer

r5.16xlarge

Answer

r5.xlarge

Answer

r5.2xlarge

Question 14

Refer to the exhibit. A CloudFormation stack creation failed with the message 'WaitCondition received failed signal'. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The script executed via cfn-signal failed to complete successfully. The `WaitCondition` resource in CloudFormation is designed to pause stack creation until it receives a success signal from a resource, typically an EC2 instance running a cfn-init script. The 'WaitCondition received failed signal' error indicates that the signal sent was explicitly a failure signal (e.g., via `cfn-signal --exit-code 1`), not that the signal was lost or blocked. This most commonly occurs when the script executed by cfn-init or a user-data script encounters an error and exits with a non-zero exit code, causing cfn-signal to send a failure signal to the WaitCondition.

Answer

The security group rules are blocking the cfn-signal communication

Answer

The stack creation timed out after 1 hour

Answer

The EC2 instance type is not supported in the region

Question 15

Which TWO AWS services can be used to provide shared storage for SAP systems running on multiple EC2 instances?

Accepted Answer

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a fully managed, shared file system with NFS and SMB support, offering features like deduplication and snapshots ideal for SAP clustered deployments. Amazon EFS also provides a shared NFSv4.1 file system accessible from multiple EC2 instances concurrently, making it suitable for SAP workloads that require shared storage. Both services enable shared storage for SAP systems running on multiple instances, while EC2 Instance Store is ephemeral, S3 is object storage, and EBS volumes are single-instance attached.

Answer

EC2 Instance Store

Answer

Amazon S3

Answer

Amazon EBS