PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Test 15 — 15 Questions

Question 1

An SAP Basis administrator notices that the SAP HANA database performance has degraded significantly after migrating to AWS. The database is running on an r5.8xlarge instance with 3.6 TB of Amazon EBS gp3 storage. The administrator checks Amazon CloudWatch metrics and finds that the Read/Write latency is consistently above 10 ms and the queue depth is averaging 32. What is the MOST likely cause of the performance degradation?

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

Accepted Answer

The EC2 instance's EBS bandwidth is fully utilized, causing I/O queueing.. The r5.8xlarge instance provides a maximum EBS bandwidth of 4,750 Mbps and a maximum EBS IOPS of 60,000. With a queue depth averaging 32 and latency above 10 ms, the instance's EBS bandwidth is saturated, causing I/O requests to queue and wait. This is the classic symptom of hitting the instance-level EBS bandwidth limit, not a volume-level issue.

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The EC2 instance type does not support enough EBS bandwidth for the workload.

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The gp3 volume burst credit balance is exhausted, causing throughput to drop to baseline.

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The EBS gp3 volume size is too small, causing IOPS throttling.

Question 2

A company is planning to run SAP S/4HANA on AWS. They need to ensure that the SAP system can be accessed from the corporate network via a secure VPN connection. Which AWS service should be used to establish this connectivity?

Accepted Answer

AWS Site-to-Site VPN. AWS Site-to-Site VPN creates a secure IPsec tunnel between the corporate network's on-premises VPN device and a Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) attached to the VPC hosting the SAP S/4HANA system. This enables encrypted communication over the public internet, meeting the requirement for secure VPN connectivity from the corporate network to the SAP workload.

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AWS Client VPN

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AWS Transit Gateway

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AWS Direct Connect

Question 3

A company is running SAP NetWeaver on AWS. The system uses an SAP HANA database. The operations team needs to monitor the database performance and receive alerts when specific metrics exceed thresholds. Which AWS service should be used to collect and analyze SAP HANA metrics?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the correct service because it can collect, monitor, and analyze SAP HANA database metrics using the AWS CloudWatch Agent or the SAP HANA CloudWatch integration. By configuring custom metrics or using the SAP HANA monitoring views, operations teams can set CloudWatch Alarms to trigger notifications when specific thresholds are exceeded, enabling proactive performance management.

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Amazon Inspector

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AWS CloudTrail

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AWS Config

Question 4

A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) solution for SAP HANA on AWS. The primary site is in us-east-1, and the DR site is in us-west-2. The RPO is 5 minutes, and the RTO is 1 hour. The company wants to use SAP HANA System Replication (HSR). Which configuration meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use asynchronous HSR with multiple secondary instances (multi-target) in us-west-2.. Multi-target asynchronous HSR allows SAP HANA to replicate data to multiple secondary instances simultaneously, meeting the 5-minute RPO with asynchronous replication while providing the flexibility to fail over to a secondary instance in us-west-2 within the 1-hour RTO. Asynchronous replication is necessary over such a long distance (us-east-1 to us-west-2) to avoid latency impacting primary site performance, and multi-target enables multiple DR targets without additional primary-side overhead.

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Use synchronous HSR between us-east-1 and us-west-2.

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Use asynchronous HSR with a single secondary instance in us-west-2.

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Use EBS snapshots every 5 minutes and copy them to us-west-2.

Question 5

A company is deploying SAP Business Suite on AWS. They need to ensure that the SAP system can handle a sudden increase in user load without manual intervention. Which AWS service should be used to automatically scale the SAP application servers?

Accepted Answer

AWS Auto Scaling. AWS Auto Scaling is the correct service because it automatically adjusts the number of SAP application server instances based on demand, using scaling policies tied to metrics like CPU utilization or memory. This ensures the SAP system can handle sudden user load spikes without manual intervention, which is a core requirement for elastic SAP deployments on AWS.

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AWS Lambda

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Amazon Elastic Container Service

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Elastic Load Balancing

Question 6

A company is running SAP HANA on AWS. They want to ensure that the database is backed up automatically and the backups are stored securely and durably. Which AWS service should be used to store the backup files?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is the correct service for storing SAP HANA backup files because it provides a highly durable (99.999999999% durability), scalable, and secure object storage platform. SAP HANA supports backing up directly to S3 using the Backint agent or via third-party backup tools, and S3 offers features like server-side encryption (SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS) and lifecycle policies for cost-effective long-term retention.

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Amazon EBS Snapshots

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Amazon RDS

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Amazon Elastic File System

Question 7

An SAP on AWS environment is experiencing intermittent connectivity issues between the SAP application servers and the SAP HANA database. Both are in the same VPC but in different Availability Zones. The network team has confirmed that the security groups allow traffic on the required ports. What is a likely cause of the issue?

Accepted Answer

Network ACLs are misconfigured, blocking return traffic.. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning they evaluate inbound and outbound traffic separately. Even if inbound rules allow traffic from the SAP application servers to the HANA database, the outbound rules on the database subnet's NACL must explicitly allow the return traffic (ephemeral ports) back to the application servers. Misconfigured outbound rules in the NACL can drop the response packets, causing intermittent connectivity issues between the application and database tiers across Availability Zones.

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AWS Shield Advanced is blocking legitimate traffic.

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VPC Flow Logs are enabled and dropping packets.

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The VPC is using AWS Direct Connect, which adds latency.

Question 8

A company is running SAP ERP on AWS and needs to encrypt data at rest for all SAP-related storage. Which combination of AWS services can be used to achieve this? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 server-side encryption. Amazon EBS encryption (Option D) provides at-rest encryption for the block storage volumes used by SAP EC2 instances, ensuring data on the underlying disks is encrypted. Amazon S3 server-side encryption (Option B) encrypts data at rest in S3 buckets, which can be used for SAP backups, log archives, or other SAP-related object storage. Together, they cover the primary storage types for SAP on AWS.

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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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AWS WAF

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Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Question 9

An SAP HANA database on AWS is running on an EC2 instance with multiple EBS volumes striped using LVM. The database administrator needs to increase the total storage capacity without downtime. Which approach should be taken? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Add the new volumes to the LVM volume group and extend the logical volume.. LVM (Logical Volume Manager) allows you to add new EBS volumes to an existing volume group and extend the logical volume without unmounting the filesystem or stopping the database. This enables online storage expansion for SAP HANA, which requires zero downtime for production workloads.

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Create a new larger instance and attach the existing volumes.

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Modify the existing volumes to a higher IOPS volume type.

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Take a snapshot of the existing volumes and restore to larger volumes.

Question 10

A company is deploying SAP NetWeaver on AWS and needs to ensure high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) and Enqueue Replication Server (ERS). Which AWS services can be used to implement a failover cluster for ASCS and ERS? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Elastic Load Balancing. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is correct because it can be used in conjunction with a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to provide a stable endpoint for SAP ASCS and ERS failover. The NLB supports static IP addresses and can be configured with health checks that monitor the SAP service, automatically routing traffic to the healthy node in the cluster. This eliminates the need for a traditional floating IP and integrates with AWS-native failover mechanisms.

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AWS CloudTrail

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AWS Config

Question 11

A company is running a mission-critical SAP S/4HANA system on AWS in the us-east-1 region. The system uses a two-tier architecture with the SAP application server and HANA database on the same EC2 instance. The instance type is an r5.24xlarge with 12 x 2 TB gp3 EBS volumes striped using LVM. The HANA data volume is 10 TB. The company has a disaster recovery (DR) requirement with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 4 hours. The DR site must be in us-west-2. The company currently takes daily EBS snapshots of the data volume and copies them to us-west-2. However, they are not meeting the RPO. The operations team is considering implementing SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) asynchronously to the DR region. However, network latency between us-east-1 and us-west-2 averages 60 ms. The SAP HANA database has a heavy write workload, with average log writes of 500 MB/sec. The team is concerned that the replication may fall behind and cause data loss. What should the team do to meet the DR requirements while minimizing data loss?

Accepted Answer

Implement HSR asynchronously and also enable HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2.. Combining asynchronous HANA System Replication (HSR) with HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2 provides a dual-layer protection strategy. Asynchronous HSR will replicate log changes in near real-time, but given the 60 ms latency and 500 MB/sec write workload, it may fall behind; the log backups act as a safety net to capture any log data that hasn't been replicated yet, allowing recovery with minimal data loss while still meeting the 15-minute RPO.

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Switch to synchronous replication to ensure zero data loss.

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Increase the HANA log buffer size to reduce the frequency of log flushes, so that less data is sent over the network.

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Use HSR with multiple replicas in us-west-2 to improve replication speed.

Question 12

A company is migrating its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) system to AWS. The source system runs on an on-premises IBM AIX server with an Oracle database. The target AWS environment will use SAP HANA as the database. The migration tool is SAP Software Provisioning Manager (SWPM). The company has a requirement to minimize downtime during the migration. The SAP BW system has 5 TB of data. The network bandwidth between on-premises and AWS is 1 Gbps. The migration team plans to use AWS Direct Connect for the data transfer. They estimate that the initial data load will take approximately 12 hours. However, the cutover window is limited to 8 hours. What should the migration team do to meet the cutover window?

Accepted Answer

Use SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) to replicate data in real-time after the initial load, and then perform a final delta sync during the cutover window.. SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) can replicate data in near real-time from the source Oracle database to the target SAP HANA using trigger-based replication. After the initial 12-hour data load is completed before the cutover window, SLT captures ongoing changes and applies them during the final delta sync within the 8-hour cutover window, minimizing downtime. This approach decouples the lengthy initial load from the limited cutover period, meeting the requirement.

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Use AWS DataSync to accelerate the data transfer and then import into HANA.

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Perform a HANA system replication from the source to the target after the initial load.

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Request a higher bandwidth Direct Connect connection to reduce the initial load time to under 8 hours.

Question 13

An SAP Basis administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue on an SAP HANA database running on AWS. The database is on an EC2 instance of type r5.12xlarge with 8 x 1 TB EBS io2 Block Express volumes configured for maximum IOPS. The application team reports that batch jobs are taking longer than expected. The administrator checks Amazon CloudWatch metrics and sees that the EBS write latency averages 2 ms, which is within the expected range. However, the CPU utilization is at 95% consistently during batch runs. The HANA index server is using 70% of the CPU. The administrator also notices that the HANA threads are mostly waiting on 'lock wait' events. What is the MOST likely cause of the performance issue?

Accepted Answer

There are SQL statement contention and locking issues in the HANA database.. The high CPU utilization (95%) combined with HANA threads waiting on 'lock wait' events indicates that SQL statement contention and locking issues are the primary bottleneck. Lock waits occur when multiple transactions compete for the same database resources, causing threads to spin or block, which consumes CPU cycles without making progress. This explains why CPU is saturated despite EBS write latency being normal (2 ms) and IOPS being sufficient.

Answer

The EBS volumes are not providing enough IOPS for the workload.

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The HANA parameter 'max_concurrency' is set too low.

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The EC2 instance type is undersized for the HANA workload.

Question 14

A company is planning to migrate SAP S/4HANA to AWS. The system has a high transaction rate and requires low network latency between SAP application servers and the database. Which AWS infrastructure design minimizes network latency between the SAP application tier and the database tier?

Accepted Answer

Place all SAP application servers and the database server in the same Availability Zone.. Placing all SAP application servers and the database server in the same Availability Zone (AZ) minimizes network latency by keeping traffic within a single, high-bandwidth, low-latency AWS data center. SAP S/4HANA with a high transaction rate is sensitive to inter-AZ latency (typically 1-2 ms), which can degrade performance for synchronous database calls. Co-locating all tiers in one AZ ensures the lowest possible round-trip time for SAP's dialog work processes and database commits.

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Place the database server in one Availability Zone and application servers in another to improve fault tolerance.

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Use a cluster placement group for the application servers and a separate placement group for the database.

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Use a mix of instance types optimized for compute and memory across different Availability Zones.

Question 15

A company runs SAP Business Suite on AWS. The database size is 2 TB. They need to restore the database to a point-in-time from the last 24 hours. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this with minimal impact on production performance?

Accepted Answer

Configure SAP HANA Backup & Recovery using Backint agent to Amazon S3.. SAP HANA Backup & Recovery using the Backint agent to Amazon S3 is the native, AWS-integrated method for performing point-in-time recovery (PITR) of SAP HANA databases. Backint offloads backup and restore operations directly to S3, bypassing the EC2 instance's I/O stack, which minimizes performance impact on production workloads. This approach supports incremental and log backups, enabling precise PITR within the last 24 hours without requiring full-volume snapshots.

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Use AWS Backup with a backup plan for the EC2 instance.

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Use Amazon EBS snapshots of the database volume.

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Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication.