PAS-C01 Technology Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Match the AWS service to its role in SAP high availability.

Accepted Answer

Elastic Load Balancing: Distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones.. In SAP on AWS, Elastic Load Balancing and Route 53 are key HA services. ELB distributes traffic across healthy instances, and Route 53 provides DNS failover. Auto Scaling helps maintain capacity but does not distribute traffic, and Lambda is not a primary HA component.

Answer

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Distributes traffic to healthy EC2 instances.

Answer

AWS Lambda: Manages automatic failover of SAP applications across Availability Zones.

Question 2

Match the AWS managed service to its SAP-related capability.

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS: Provides shared file storage for SAP applications. Correct matches: Amazon EFS for shared file storage, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for SMB storage, Amazon Route 53 for DNS, Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring. Common confusions include mistaking EFS for block storage and FSx for Lustre for SAP HANA.

Answer

Amazon EFS: Provides block storage for SAP HANA

Answer

Amazon FSx for Lustre: Provides high-performance shared storage for SAP HANA

Question 3

A company is running an SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 instance. The instance type is r5.4xlarge with 16 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. The storage is configured with a single 400 GB gp2 EBS volume for /hana/data and a separate 100 GB gp2 volume for /hana/log. The database experiences high latency during peak loads. Which change will most likely improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Change the EBS volumes to io2 Block Express volumes with provisioned IOPS.. SAP HANA on EC2 requires consistently low latency for /hana/data and /hana/log volumes, especially under peak loads. The gp2 volume's burst model can deplete credits, causing throughput throttling and high latency. io2 Block Express volumes provide consistent, provisioned IOPS performance without reliance on burst credits, directly addressing the latency issue.

Answer

Increase the instance size to r5.8xlarge.

Answer

Disable the EBS volume caching.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 stripe of multiple gp2 volumes.

Question 4

An SAP administrator is configuring high availability for SAP HANA on AWS. Which TWO components are essential for a Pacemaker-based cluster?

Accepted Answer

A quorum device (e.g., STONITH). A quorum device such as STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) is essential in a Pacemaker-based SAP HANA HA cluster because it provides fencing to prevent split-brain scenarios, ensuring that a failed or unresponsive node is reliably isolated before the surviving node takes over resources. A virtual IP (VIP) address is also essential because Pacemaker manages it as a cluster resource, allowing SAP HANA clients and applications to connect to a single, consistent address that floats to whichever node is currently active. An Application Load Balancer is not required for a Pacemaker cluster since failover is handled by the cluster software and the VIP, not by an ALB. Amazon Route 53 health checks are not essential because DNS-based failover is not how Pacemaker manages resource movement. Amazon CloudWatch alarms are useful for monitoring but are not a functional component of the Pacemaker cluster itself.

Answer

An Application Load Balancer

Answer

Amazon Route 53 health checks

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch alarms

Question 5

A company is deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to choose instance types that are certified by SAP. Which TWO instance families are SAP-certified for production SAP HANA workloads?

Accepted Answer

R5. R5 (option A) is correct because the AWS R5 family is SAP-certified for production SAP HANA workloads, offering memory-optimized instances with high memory-to-vCPU ratios suitable for HANA in-memory processing. X1e (option C) is also correct because the X1e family is specifically designed and SAP-certified for large-scale, memory-intensive production SAP HANA deployments, supporting very high memory capacities. T3 (option B) is not certified for production HANA since it is a burstable, general-purpose family with limited and variable memory performance. M5 (option D) is a general-purpose family that, while used for some SAP application servers, is not certified for production HANA database workloads. P3 (option E) is a GPU-accelerated family intended for machine learning and graphics, not for SAP HANA production databases.

Answer

T3

Answer

M5

Answer

P3

Question 6

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. Option C is correct because EBS snapshots can be copied from one AWS region to another using the CopySnapshot API or the console, providing cross-region block-level replication for SAP data volumes and enabling disaster recovery. Option D is correct because Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically and asynchronously replicates objects from a source bucket to a destination bucket in a different region, which is useful for SAP backups, exports, and file-based data. Option A is not correct because Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches content at edge locations; it does not replicate origin data across regions. Option B is not correct because Amazon EFS Replication is a feature of Amazon EFS for replicating file systems, not a standalone AWS service, and it is not one of the two services intended here. Option E is not correct because Amazon RDS read replicas can be created in another region, but they are a feature of Amazon RDS rather than a separate AWS service, and the question asks for AWS services.

Answer

Amazon CloudFront

Answer

Amazon EFS replication

Answer

Amazon RDS read replicas in another region

Question 7

An SAP administrator attaches this IAM policy to a user. Which action will the user be allowed to perform on an EC2 instance with the tag 'Environment: Production'?

Accepted Answer

Reboot the instance. The IAM policy grants the ec2:RebootInstances action with a condition that the resource must have the tag 'Environment: Production'. Therefore, the user is allowed to reboot any EC2 instance that carries that tag. The other actions (start, terminate, modify instance type) are not explicitly allowed by the policy, so they are denied by default.

Answer

Start the instance

Answer

Terminate the instance

Answer

Modify the instance type

Question 8

An administrator needs to retrieve the private IP address of an ASCS instance that was deployed via AWS CloudFormation. What is the most efficient way to get this IP address?

Accepted Answer

Modify the CloudFormation template to add the private IP as an output.. CloudFormation stack outputs are the intended mechanism for exposing resource attributes, such as private IP addresses, after stack creation. By modifying the template to include the private IP as an output, the administrator can retrieve it directly via the AWS CLI `describe-stacks` command without additional API calls or manual lookups, making it the most efficient and automated approach.

Answer

Check the CloudFormation stack events for the private IP.

Answer

Use the AWS CLI to describe the EC2 instance using the instance ID.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager to find the IP from the instance ID.

Question 9

An administrator receives this error when trying to register an SAP system in AWS Systems Manager. What is the likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The SAP Host Agent is not installed on the EC2 instance.. The error occurs because AWS Systems Manager requires the SAP Host Agent to be installed and running on the EC2 instance to register an SAP system. Without the SAP Host Agent, Systems Manager cannot discover or manage the SAP instance, even if the SSM Agent and IAM permissions are correctly configured.

Answer

The IAM role assigned to the instance does not have the required permissions.

Answer

The AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is not running.

Answer

The SAP system is not installed correctly.

Question 10

An SAP system running on AWS uses a large memory-optimized instance (e.g., u-6tb1.metal). The system administrator notices that SAP workloads are occasionally hitting memory swap, causing performance degradation. The SAP application is configured to use SAP HANA. What is the most effective solution to address this issue?

Accepted Answer

Configure HANA Large Pages to reduce memory fragmentation. Configuring HANA Large Pages reduces memory fragmentation and improves memory management efficiency, which can help alleviate memory pressure and reduce swap usage. SAP HANA recommends using large pages to optimize memory allocation and minimize overhead. Option A is incorrect because HANA memory overcommit and KSM are not recommended for HANA; KSM can cause performance overhead and unpredictability, and overcommit is not a standard practice. Option C is a monitoring solution that does not address the root cause. Option D increases swap space, which only masks the problem and can degrade performance further.

Answer

Enable HANA memory overcommit and use Kernel Same-page Merging (KSM) to reduce memory pressure

Answer

Set up a CloudWatch alarm to notify when memory usage exceeds 90%

Answer

Increase swap space on an attached EBS volume

Question 11

A company is planning a migration of their SAP ERP system to AWS. They want to use SAP HANA as the database. The current on-premises database size is 2 TB. The migration must have minimal downtime. Which combination of AWS services and methods should be used to achieve a near-zero downtime migration?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS DMS with a SAP HANA source and target, configuring ongoing replication to minimize downtime. AWS DMS with a SAP HANA source and target, configuring ongoing replication, is correct because it supports near-zero downtime migration by continuously replicating changes from the on-premises HANA database to the target HANA database on AWS until cutover. DMS uses log-based change data capture (CDC) to capture ongoing transactions, allowing the source to remain operational during the bulk load and then switch with minimal interruption.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with an SAP HANA source and S3 as target

Answer

Use SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to replicate data to an EC2 instance in AWS

Answer

Use AWS Backup to perform a continuous backup of the on-premises HANA database and restore to AWS

Question 12

An SAP system running on AWS is experiencing intermittent network connectivity issues between the application server and the database server. Both servers are in the same VPC but in different Availability Zones. The network ACLs and security groups are properly configured. What is the most likely cause and solution?

Accepted Answer

The route tables are not correctly configured for cross-AZ traffic; verify and update route tables. The most likely cause is that the route tables in the subnets do not have routes for the destination CIDR of the other Availability Zone (AZ). By default, each subnet in a VPC is associated with a route table, and for traffic to flow between subnets in different AZs, the route tables must include a local route for the VPC CIDR. If the route tables are misconfigured (e.g., missing the local route or pointing to an incorrect target), cross-AZ traffic will fail, causing intermittent connectivity issues between the application and database servers.

Answer

The security groups are stateful and blocking return traffic; use network ACLs instead

Answer

Use AWS Transit Gateway to connect the subnets in different AZs

Answer

The network ACLs are blocking traffic between Availability Zones; update the NACLs

Question 13

A company operates an SAP system on AWS with a shared SAP HANA database across multiple SAP applications. The database size is 5 TB. The operations team wants to implement a disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Configure SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to a secondary instance in another AWS Region. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to a secondary instance in another AWS Region meets the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 2 hours with the least operational overhead because HSR provides synchronous or near-synchronous replication at the database level, ensuring minimal data loss and fast failover. It is natively supported by SAP HANA, requires no additional third-party tools, and integrates directly with AWS for cross-Region networking via VPC peering or Direct Connect, making it the most efficient and low-maintenance DR solution for a shared 5 TB HANA database.

Answer

Use AWS DMS to replicate data to an S3 bucket in a different Region

Answer

Use SAP HANA backup to S3 and restore in another Region

Answer

Use AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to replicate the entire server

Question 14

An SAP customer has a mission-critical system running on AWS. They need to ensure that the SAP application can survive an Availability Zone failure without manual intervention. The SAP application is stateless. The database is SAP HANA with System Replication. What is the most comprehensive architecture to achieve automatic failover?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the SAP application in an Auto Scaling group across multiple AZs and configure SAP HANA System Replication with automatic failover using AWS resources. It combines stateless SAP application auto-scaling across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) with SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) configured for automatic failover. HSR uses synchronous replication to keep the standby HANA database in sync, and when combined with AWS services like Amazon Route 53 health checks or a cluster manager (e.g., Pacemaker), the failover occurs automatically without manual intervention. This architecture ensures both the application and database tiers survive an AZ failure seamlessly.

Answer

Use Amazon Route 53 health checks to switch DNS to a standby instance in another AZ

Answer

Deploy the SAP application in an Auto Scaling group across two AZs and use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for HANA

Answer

Deploy the SAP application behind an Application Load Balancer and use SAP HANA System Replication with manual failover scripts

Question 15

An SAP system running on AWS is experiencing high CPU usage on the application server during peak hours. The system is already using the largest instance type available in the current generation. What is the most cost-effective solution to handle the peak load?

Accepted Answer

Add an additional SAP application server in the same Availability Zone. SAP on AWS supports horizontal scaling by adding more application servers to distribute the load, which is the most cost-effective approach when the current instance type is already the largest available. Option C correctly adds an additional SAP application server in the same Availability Zone, leveraging SAP's native architecture to handle peak CPU usage without incurring the cost of a larger, potentially unavailable instance.

Answer

Upgrade to a larger instance type from a different instance family

Answer

Purchase Reserved Instances to reduce cost and allocate more resources

Answer

Use Auto Scaling to automatically add instances during peak hours