PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing an SAP HANA disaster recovery (DR) solution on AWS. The primary site is in us-east-1, and the DR site is in us-west-2. The RPO must be less than 15 minutes, and the RTO must be less than 2 hours. Which replication strategy meets these requirements?

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

Accepted Answer

SAP HANA system replication with synchronous mode and pre-provisioned DR instances.. SAP HANA system replication with synchronous mode ensures that every committed transaction is replicated to the DR site before acknowledgment, meeting the <15-minute RPO. Pre-provisioned DR instances in us-west-2 allow rapid failover, enabling the <2-hour RTO by eliminating the need to provision infrastructure during recovery.

Answer

SAP HANA log shipping to an S3 bucket in the DR region.

Answer

S3 cross-region replication for HANA data files.

Answer

EBS snapshot replication to the DR region every 15 minutes.

Question 2

An SAP HANA database on AWS is using EBS io2 volumes. The company wants to monitor the read and write latency of the database volumes. Which CloudWatch metrics should be used?

Accepted Answer

VolumeReadLatency and VolumeWriteLatency.. CloudWatch provides the `VolumeReadLatency` and `VolumeWriteLatency` metrics specifically to monitor the average time (in seconds) for read and write I/O operations on EBS volumes. For SAP HANA on io2 volumes, these metrics directly reflect storage performance and are critical for detecting latency issues that could impact database throughput and transaction response times.

Answer

VolumeIdleTime and VolumeTotalReadTime.

Answer

VolumeThroughputPercentage and VolumeConsumedReadWriteOps.

Answer

VolumeQueueLength and VolumeThroughput.

Question 3

Which TWO configurations are required for a high-availability SAP HANA deployment on AWS using Pacemaker? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

STONITH fencing configured for the cluster nodes.. Option B is correct because a Pacemaker cluster requires STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) fencing to reliably isolate a failed or unresponsive node, preventing split-brain and data corruption in an SAP HANA high-availability setup on AWS; this is typically implemented with an AWS STONITH agent (fence_aws) using EC2 API calls. Option E is correct because SAP HANA high availability fundamentally relies on SAP HANA system replication (HSR) to continuously ship redo logs from the primary to the secondary instance, enabling takeover with minimal data loss. Option A is not required because Pacemaker cluster nodes must reside in the same AWS Region and are typically placed in different Availability Zones using separate placement groups per AZ, not placement groups spanning separate AZs. Option C is incorrect because EBS multi-attach is limited to io1/io2 volumes in the same AZ and is not the supported mechanism for SAP HANA shared storage in a Pacemaker cluster. Option D is incorrect because an AWS Classic Load Balancer is not used to route traffic to the active SAP HANA node; an overlay IP address (virtual IP) managed by Pacemaker handles client redirection.

Answer

Placement groups in separate Availability Zones for the cluster nodes.

Answer

EBS volumes with multi-attach enabled for shared storage.

Answer

An AWS Classic Load Balancer to route traffic to the active node.

Question 4

Which TWO AWS services can be used to monitor the performance of SAP NetWeaver application servers? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

AWS Systems Manager. Amazon CloudWatch (E) is correct because it is AWS's native monitoring service that collects performance metrics (CPU, memory via the CloudWatch agent, disk, network) and logs from SAP NetWeaver application servers running on EC2, enabling alarms and dashboards for performance monitoring. AWS Systems Manager (C) is correct because it provides operational monitoring and management capabilities such as Run Command, Inventory, and the CloudWatch agent/SSM agent integration, letting you collect OS-level metrics and perform health checks on SAP NetWeaver instances. AWS CloudTrail (A) only records API activity and audit events, not runtime performance. AWS Trusted Advisor (B) gives best-practice recommendations and checks, not live application-server performance monitoring. AWS X-Ray (D) traces requests in distributed applications and is not used to monitor SAP NetWeaver application server performance.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

AWS X-Ray

Question 5

A company is migrating its SAP ERP system to AWS. The system requires high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) instance. Which AWS architecture should be used to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use a multi-AZ deployment with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a shared file system and place ASCS on two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones with an Elastic IP address.. SAP ASCS requires a highly available shared file system and a floating IP address for failover. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a highly available, NFS-based shared file system that supports the SAP transport and profile directories across Availability Zones. Placing two EC2 instances in different AZs with an Elastic IP address allows the ASCS instance to be failed over manually or via a cluster manager, meeting the high availability requirement.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 to store the ASCS configuration and launch a single EC2 instance with an Auto Scaling group.

Answer

Deploy ASCS on a single EC2 instance in one Availability Zone with an EBS volume snapshot for recovery.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS for SAP Central Services running in a Multi-AZ configuration.

Question 6

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS and notices high latency in database transactions. The database is hosted on an r5.24xlarge instance with 768 GB of EBS gp3 storage. The SAP application servers are in the same VPC but different subnets. What should be changed to reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Change the EBS volume type to io2 Block Express with maximum IOPS.. Gp3 volumes may not provide the low latency required for SAP HANA database transactions. Switching to io2 Block Express volumes offers higher and more consistent IOPS with lower latency, which can reduce high database transaction latency. Option C is misleading because EBS optimization is already enabled by default on r5 instances, so 'enabling' it is not a valid change.

Answer

Use a smaller instance type to reduce network hops.

Answer

Place the database instance in a cluster placement group with the application servers.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the database instance and ensure the instance type supports dedicated EBS bandwidth.

Question 7

A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for SAP S/4HANA on AWS. The primary site is in us-east-1 and the DR site is in us-west-2. The SAP HANA database is 2 TB and requires Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to an EC2 instance in us-west-2 with log replication in sync mode.. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) with synchronous log replication meets the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 4 hours because it continuously replicates transaction logs to the DR site in us-west-2, ensuring near-zero data loss. In sync mode, the primary waits for the secondary to acknowledge log writes, which keeps the DR database consistent and ready for takeover within minutes, well under the 4-hour RTO. This is the only option that provides continuous, database-level replication with the required recovery objectives.

Answer

Use AWS S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy database backups every 15 minutes.

Answer

Take EBS snapshots of the HANA data volume every hour and copy them to us-west-2.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to continuously replicate changes to a HANA instance in us-west-2.

Question 8

A company runs SAP ERP 6.0 on an Oracle database on EC2. The system is experiencing high CPU usage on the database server during peak hours. Analysis shows that the CPU is consumed by log writes. Which configuration change can reduce CPU usage?

Accepted Answer

Increase the Oracle log buffer size to reduce the number of log write operations.. High CPU usage from log writes indicates that the database is spending excessive CPU cycles on writing redo log entries to disk. Increasing the Oracle log buffer size reduces the frequency of log write operations by allowing more redo data to accumulate before a write is triggered, thereby lowering CPU overhead. This directly addresses the root cause without changing storage or compute capacity.

Answer

Disable archiving of redo logs.

Answer

Switch from EBS gp3 to io2 Block Express volumes.

Answer

Upgrade to a larger EC2 instance type with more vCPUs.

Question 9

An SAP administrator wants to monitor the CPU utilization of SAP application servers using Amazon CloudWatch. What is the minimum configuration required?

Accepted Answer

Install and configure the AWS CloudWatch Agent on each SAP application server.. The AWS CloudWatch Agent must be installed and configured on each SAP application server to collect custom metrics like CPU utilization at the granularity and frequency required for SAP monitoring. CloudWatch by default only provides basic EC2 metrics (every 5 minutes) and cannot capture OS-level or application-level CPU utilization without the agent. The agent sends metrics via the CloudWatch PutMetricData API, enabling detailed monitoring of SAP-specific performance counters.

Answer

Set up an AWS Lambda function to query EC2 metrics from the CloudWatch API.

Answer

Configure SAP Solution Manager to export metrics to CloudWatch.

Answer

Enable EC2 detailed monitoring from the AWS Management Console.

Question 10

A company is planning to run SAP Business Suite on AWS with an Oracle database. The database requires a shared file system for Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI). Which AWS storage service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a fully managed, shared file system that supports the NFS and SMB protocols required by Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) for clusterware and Oracle RAC. It offers high availability, consistent performance, and the ability to present a single namespace across multiple Availability Zones, which is essential for Oracle GI's shared-storage architecture.

Answer

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).

Answer

Amazon S3 with a file gateway.

Answer

Multiple Amazon EBS volumes with a cluster-aware file system.

Question 11

A company is designing an SAP HANA multi-node scale-out system on AWS. Which two of the following are required for the network configuration? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Create a separate subnet for HANA internal communication.. Option D is correct because SAP HANA scale-out nodes exchange high-volume internal traffic (e.g., SAP HANA internode communication over the private network), and AWS best practice is to isolate this traffic in a dedicated subnet to control routing, security groups, and bandwidth. Option E is correct because a cluster placement group packs all nodes close together within a single Availability Zone, providing the low-latency, high-throughput network needed for HANA's distributed internode communication. Option A is wrong because inter-node communication should use private IP addresses inside the VPC, not public IPs, which add cost and security exposure. Option B is wrong because an Elastic Load Balancer distributes client traffic and is not used for HANA internode communication, which relies on direct node-to-node connections. Option C is wrong because EBS optimization is a storage/instance performance setting, not a network configuration requirement for scale-out.

Answer

Assign public IP addresses to each node for inter-node communication.

Answer

Configure an Elastic Load Balancer to distribute traffic among nodes.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on all EC2 instances.

Question 12

A company is migrating SAP workloads to AWS and needs to choose storage for SAP HANA. Which two storage options are supported for SAP HANA data volumes? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes.. Option A (Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes) is correct because AWS supports io2 Block Express as a high-performance, low-latency block storage option for SAP HANA data volumes, delivering the sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS required by HANA. Option E (Amazon EBS gp3 volumes) is correct because AWS also supports gp3 as a general-purpose SSD option for SAP HANA data volumes, provided the provisioned IOPS and throughput meet SAP's certified performance requirements. Option B (Amazon S3) is incorrect because S3 is object storage and cannot serve as a block-level data volume for a running SAP HANA database. Option C (Amazon EFS) is incorrect because EFS is a shared NFS file system, not a supported block storage device for HANA data volumes. Option D (Instance Store NVMe SSD) is incorrect because instance store is ephemeral and non-persistent, so it is not supported for SAP HANA data volumes that require durable storage.

Answer

Amazon S3.

Answer

Amazon EFS.

Answer

Instance Store (NVMe SSD) volumes.

Question 13

An SAP administrator created the IAM policy above for an EC2 instance role used by SAP HANA Backint agent. The backup to S3 fails with access denied. What is the likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The policy grants permissions on objects but not on the bucket itself. For s3:PutObject and s3:GetObject, a bucket-level permission is also required for some operations.. The policy grants s3:PutObject and s3:GetObject on objects within the bucket (using the "arn:aws:s3:::bucket-name/*" resource), but does not include a bucket-level permission such as s3:PutObject or s3:GetObject on the bucket itself ("arn:aws:s3:::bucket-name"). For certain S3 operations, including multipart uploads and object writes that require bucket-level authorization checks, the IAM policy must explicitly allow the action on both the bucket and the object ARN. Without this, the SAP HANA Backint agent fails with access denied.

Answer

The policy does not allow s3:PutObject.

Answer

The policy does not allow ec2:CreateSnapshot.

Answer

The policy does not allow s3:ListBucket.

Question 14

An SAP HANA database is running on a Dedicated Host in us-east-1a. The system requires a disaster recovery site in us-west-2. What limitation does the use of a Dedicated Host impose on the DR setup?

Accepted Answer

The DR site requires a separate Dedicated Host in us-west-2, increasing cost.. A Dedicated Host in us-east-1a is a physical server dedicated to your use, and to set up disaster recovery in us-west-2, you must provision a separate Dedicated Host in that region. This increases costs as you are paying for two Dedicated Hosts instead of one, and the DR host cannot be shared or reserved in advance for a specific instance type without an active allocation.

Answer

The DR site must also use a Dedicated Host, which cannot be reserved in advance.

Answer

The Dedicated Host cannot be used with SAP HANA System Replication.

Answer

The HANA instance cannot be migrated to a different host, so DR is not possible.

Question 15

An SAP administrator wants to attach the EBS volume shown above to two EC2 instances running SAP HANA in a scale-out configuration. What is the issue?

Accepted Answer

The volume is gp3 type, which does not support Multi-Attach.. The gp3 volume type does not support the Multi-Attach feature, which is required to attach a single EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously. For SAP HANA scale-out configurations, shared storage is necessary for the /hana/shared file system, and Multi-Attach is only supported on io1 and io2 block express volumes. Therefore, using a gp3 volume prevents the multi-attach capability needed for this architecture.

Answer

The volume size is too small for HANA scale-out.

Answer

SAP HANA scale-out does not support shared volumes.

Answer

The volume IOPS is insufficient.