PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Test 28 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is planning to run SAP HANA on AWS. Which TWO of the following are required to ensure the system is supported by SAP? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use an operating system that is on the SAP HANA supported OS list. SAP requires the operating system to be listed on the SAP HANA supported OS list. Running an unsupported OS violates SAP's support policy and can lead to denial of support for the entire HANA system.

Answer

Place all instances in a cluster placement group

Answer

Use only EBS io2 Block Express volumes for all HANA data

Answer

Enable termination protection on all instances

Question 2

Which THREE of the following are best practices for securing an SAP system on AWS? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Enable CloudTrail to log API calls for auditing. AWS CloudTrail records all API calls made to the AWS environment, including those that modify SAP infrastructure (e.g., EC2 instance launches, security group changes). Enabling CloudTrail provides an immutable audit log that is essential for compliance, security incident investigation, and operational troubleshooting in an SAP landscape. This aligns with the AWS shared responsibility model, where customers must log and monitor actions taken on their SAP workloads.

Answer

Use the same security group for all SAP instances

Answer

Store SAP license keys in a public S3 bucket

Question 3

A company is migrating its SAP ERP system to AWS. The system includes an SAP Central Services (ASCS) instance and an SAP application server. Which TWO of the following are required for high availability? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Enqueue replication server (ERS) must be set up for the ASCS cluster. The Enqueue Replication Server (ERS) is a mandatory component for an SAP ASCS high-availability cluster. In a clustered ASCS setup, the ERS replicates the lock table from the active ASCS node to the standby node, ensuring that in the event of a failover, the new active ASCS instance can recover the locks without data inconsistency. Without ERS, the ASCS cluster cannot provide true high availability for the enqueue service.

Answer

Use an EBS Multi-Attach volume for shared /sapmnt

Answer

Configure an Elastic Load Balancer for ASCS

Answer

Deploy at least two application servers in different Availability Zones

Question 4

A company is migrating an SAP S/4HANA system to AWS. The system requires high availability across two Availability Zones. Which AWS service should be used to attach a block-level storage volume that can be concurrently accessed by two EC2 instances in active/passive mode?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP to provide a shared block storage volume accessible from both AZs.. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a shared block-level storage volume that can be concurrently accessed by multiple EC2 instances across different Availability Zones using the iSCSI protocol. In an active/passive SAP S/4HANA setup, this allows the passive instance to mount the same storage volume and take over if the active instance fails, meeting the high-availability requirement across two AZs.

Answer

Use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server with a multi-AZ file system.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 as a shared block storage device.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS Multi-Attach to attach a single EBS volume to both EC2 instances across AZs.

Question 5

An SAP Basis administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue on an SAP HANA database running on an EC2 instance. The administrator notices that the 'hdbcons' command shows high 'wait time' for 'disk I/O' operations. The instance is an r5.4xlarge with 500 GB of gp2 EBS volumes for /hana/data and /hana/log. Which of the following is the MOST effective action to improve disk I/O performance?

Accepted Answer

Change the EBS volume type from gp2 to gp3 with higher IOPS and throughput.. Changing the EBS volume type from gp2 to gp3 with higher IOPS and throughput is the most effective action because gp3 offers a baseline performance that can be increased independently of volume size, and it provides higher IOPS and throughput compared to gp2. This directly addresses the high disk I/O wait time. Upgrading the instance type (option C) may not resolve the I/O bottleneck if the volumes are the limiting factor. Increasing snapshot frequency (option A) does not improve I/O performance. Disabling delta merge (option D) is not recommended and does not address disk I/O issues.

Answer

Increase the frequency of EBS snapshots to offload I/O.

Answer

Upgrade to a larger EC2 instance type with more CPU and memory.

Answer

Disable the HANA delta merge operation to reduce I/O load.

Question 6

A company runs SAP ERP on AWS using an Oracle database. To meet disaster recovery requirements, they need to replicate the database to a second AWS Region with low RPO. Which AWS service should be used for continuous, asynchronous replication of the Oracle database?

Accepted Answer

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication from the source Oracle database to a target Oracle database in the DR Region.. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication is the correct choice because it supports continuous, asynchronous change data capture (CDC) from an on-premises or EC2-hosted Oracle source to a target Oracle database in another AWS Region, achieving low RPO by replicating transactions in near real-time without requiring application downtime. This meets the DR requirement for cross-region replication of an Oracle database with minimal data loss.

Answer

Copy the EC2 instance with the Oracle database as an AMI to the DR Region.

Answer

Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to replicate database backups.

Answer

Amazon RDS for Oracle Read Replicas in the DR Region.

Question 7

A company runs SAP on AWS with an SAP HANA database on a single EC2 instance. They want to implement a disaster recovery solution with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 hour. The DR site is in a different AWS Region. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in the DR Region and use automated EBS snapshots for cross-Region replication.. SAP HANA System Replication provides synchronous or asynchronous data replication to a secondary instance in another AWS Region, meeting the RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 15 minutes when combined with automated EBS snapshots for cross-Region replication. This approach ensures near-continuous database replication and rapid failover, while EBS snapshots provide additional consistency and recovery points.

Answer

Set up an automated process to copy the EC2 instance AMI to the DR Region every hour.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate the HANA data directory to the DR Region.

Answer

Perform periodic HANA database backups to S3 and restore in the DR Region when needed.

Question 8

Which AWS service should be used to capture and analyze operating system-level metrics from an EC2 instance running SAP, such as memory utilization and disk I/O, and to set alarms based on thresholds?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch with the CloudWatch Agent. Amazon CloudWatch with the CloudWatch Agent is the correct choice because the CloudWatch Agent can collect custom operating system-level metrics (such as memory utilization and disk I/O) from EC2 instances, including those running SAP. The agent sends these metrics to CloudWatch, where you can set alarms based on thresholds. AWS Config, Trusted Advisor, and Inspector do not provide OS-level metric collection or alarm capabilities.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Question 9

A company plans to migrate its SAP ERP system from an on-premises environment to AWS. The system uses an Oracle database. Which AWS service provides the most cost-effective and high-performance storage for the Oracle data files?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes. Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes provide the highest performance and durability for Oracle database workloads on AWS, offering up to 256,000 IOPS per volume and sub-millisecond latency. They are the most cost-effective choice for SAP ERP Oracle data files because they deliver consistent, high-throughput performance required for SAP's demanding I/O patterns, while allowing you to pay only for provisioned capacity without upfront costs. io2 volumes also support multi-attach and are designed for mission-critical databases, making them the optimal storage for Oracle data files in SAP on AWS.

Answer

EC2 Instance Store

Answer

Amazon EFS

Answer

Amazon S3

Question 10

An SAP administrator needs to set up a fault-tolerant architecture for SAP NetWeaver on AWS. The architecture must survive an entire Availability Zone failure. Which configuration is the most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group to launch SAP application servers across multiple AZs behind an Application Load Balancer.. Deploying SAP application servers across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) provides fault tolerance at the AZ level. The ALB distributes traffic to healthy instances in different AZs, ensuring that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZs continue to serve requests without interruption. This architecture aligns with SAP's recommended high-availability pattern for the ABAP stateless application tier.

Answer

Deploy all SAP application servers in one Availability Zone and use Amazon EBS snapshots for backup.

Answer

Deploy SAP application servers across multiple AZs but without a load balancer.

Answer

Use a single large EC2 instance for all SAP components.

Question 11

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS. The system is experiencing high CPU utilization during peak hours. Which TWO actions should the administrator take to address this? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Right-size the EC2 instance to a larger type with more vCPUs.. Right-sizing the EC2 instance to a larger type with more vCPUs directly addresses high CPU utilization by providing additional compute capacity for peak workloads. SAP HANA is CPU-intensive, especially during query processing and data compression, so increasing vCPUs alleviates the bottleneck without requiring architectural changes.

Answer

Disable HANA columnar compression to reduce CPU overhead.

Answer

Increase the size of the /hana/data EBS volumes.

Answer

Reduce the network throughput of the EC2 instance.

Question 12

An SAP system on AWS uses an Oracle database. The administrator wants to automate the creation of daily backups and retain them for 30 days. Which THREE AWS services can be used together to achieve this? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 lifecycle policies. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies (A) are correct because they can be used to automatically transition backup data to lower-cost storage tiers (e.g., S3 Standard-IA or S3 Glacier) and expire objects after a specified retention period (30 days). This enables cost-effective, automated management of daily backups without manual intervention.

Answer

AWS Lambda

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events

Question 13

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for SAP HANA on AWS using HANA System Replication. The primary site is in us-east-1 and the DR site is in us-west-2. Which component is required to enable replication across Regions?

Accepted Answer

AWS Site-to-Site VPN or AWS Direct Connect between the two Regions. To enable HANA System Replication (HSR) across AWS Regions, a reliable, low-latency network connection is required. AWS Site-to-Site VPN or AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated, secure network path that meets SAP's latency and stability requirements. The other options (VPC peering, automated EBS snapshots, Global Accelerator, S3 Transfer Acceleration) are not required for HSR; HSR performs its own initial data synchronization, and VPC peering does not guarantee the required performance for HANA replication.

Answer

VPC peering between the two VPCs

Answer

Automated EBS snapshots of /hana/data and /hana/log volumes in us-east-1, copied to us-west-2

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator

Answer

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 14

A company runs its SAP ERP system on AWS with an Oracle database on an EC2 instance. The system is used by thousands of users globally. Recently, the database has been experiencing slow query performance, especially during end-of-month processing. The administrator notices that the database instance is an r5.8xlarge with 32 vCPUs and 256 GB of memory, running on a single EBS io1 volume with 20,000 IOPS for the data files. The administrator has already optimized the SQL queries and increased the SGA size. However, performance remains poor. The Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volume's Average Queue Length is consistently above 10 and the read latency spikes to over 100 ms during peak times. The CPU utilization is around 70%. Which action should the administrator take to resolve the I/O bottleneck?

Accepted Answer

Create multiple EBS io1 volumes and stripe them using RAID 0 at the OS level.. Striping multiple EBS io1 volumes using RAID 0 at the OS level increases I/O parallelism, distributing the workload across multiple volumes and reducing the average queue length and latency. Option A is incorrect because gp3 volumes may not provide sufficient IOPS for this demanding workload, and a single volume still creates a bottleneck. Option C is incorrect because increasing IOPS on a single volume may not resolve the queue length issue if the volume is already at its throughput limit. Option D is incorrect because upgrading the instance does not directly improve EBS performance; the bottleneck is at the storage layer.

Answer

Change the volume type to gp3 and increase the baseline IOPS.

Answer

Increase the IOPS of the existing io1 volume to 40,000.

Answer

Upgrade the EC2 instance to an r5.12xlarge with more network bandwidth.

Question 15

A company has deployed SAP S/4HANA on AWS using a single EC2 instance for the HANA database and multiple EC2 instances for the application servers. The system is in production and the company wants to implement high availability for the HANA database to minimize downtime during patching and failures. The HANA database is critical and must have an RTO of less than 5 minutes and an RPO of zero. The current setup uses a single EBS volume for /hana/data and another for /hana/log. The company has two Availability Zones available. Which solution meets the requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure SAP HANA System Replication with automatic failover to a secondary HANA instance in another AZ.. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) with automatic failover meets the RTO < 5 minutes and RPO = 0 requirements by synchronously replicating data to a secondary HANA instance in another Availability Zone. Automatic failover ensures the secondary takes over without manual intervention, minimizing downtime during patching or failures. This is the only option that provides synchronous replication with zero data loss and fast failover across AZs.

Answer

Attach the EBS volumes to two EC2 instances using EBS Multi-Attach.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to schedule snapshots every 5 minutes and restore in another AZ if needed.

Answer

Deploy the HANA database on a larger EC2 instance with higher availability SLA.