PAS-C01 Practice Questions

Question 1

An SAP system on AWS experiences intermittent performance issues. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU credit usage on the t3.large EC2 instance hosting the SAP application. The instance is configured as a 'standard' placement group. What is the MOST likely cause and recommended action?

Accepted Answer

The burstable instance is exhausting its CPU credits. Change to a non-burstable instance.. The t3.large is a burstable instance that earns CPU credits when idle and spends them when active. SAP applications often have sustained CPU demands that can exhaust the credit balance, causing performance throttling. Switching to a non-burstable instance (e.g., m5.large) provides consistent baseline CPU performance without credit-based limitations.

Answer

The instance size is too small. Move to a larger t3 instance.

Answer

The placement group is causing network bottlenecks. Move to a cluster placement group.

Answer

The EBS volume is not provisioned with enough IOPS. Increase the volume size.

Question 2

A company is deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the database and application servers are in the same placement group to minimize latency. However, the instance types required for the HANA database are not available in the same placement group due to insufficient capacity. What should the company do to maintain low latency?

Accepted Answer

Use a spread placement group instead of a cluster placement group.. A spread placement group is the correct choice because it spreads instances across distinct underlying hardware, reducing the risk of correlated failures while still keeping them in the same Availability Zone to minimize latency. Unlike a cluster placement group, which requires all instances to be on the same rack and can suffer from capacity constraints, a spread placement group does not enforce a single rack placement, so it can accommodate different instance types even when the cluster placement group lacks capacity. This ensures low latency for SAP S/4HANA communication between database and application servers without violating placement group constraints.

Answer

Place all instances in the same Availability Zone without a placement group.

Answer

Use a different instance type for the database that is available in the placement group.

Answer

Place the database in a different AWS Region and use AWS Direct Connect.

Question 3

An SAP administrator runs the commands above to inspect the volumes attached to an EC2 instance that hosts an SAP HANA database. The database log files are stored on /dev/sdf. What is a potential issue with this configuration?

Accepted Answer

The log volume uses gp3, which may not provide enough IOPS for HANA log writes.. Gp3 volumes may not provide sufficient IOPS for HANA log writes, which require high IOPS and low latency. Options B, C, and D are incorrect: /dev/sdf is a standard device name, DeleteOnTermination=false is fine for persistence, and encryption is not shown to be an issue.

Answer

The log volume is attached as /dev/sdf, which is not a standard device name for HANA.

Answer

The root volume will be deleted on termination, causing data loss.

Answer

The log volume is not encrypted.

Question 4

A company runs SAP on AWS and is experiencing high latency for database queries after moving the SAP HANA database to a larger instance type. CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volume queue length is consistently high. What is the most likely cause of the latency?

Accepted Answer

The EBS volume does not have enough provisioned IOPS.. A consistently high EBS volume queue length indicates that the volume is receiving more I/O requests than it can process, causing requests to queue up. Since the SAP HANA database was moved to a larger instance type, the workload likely demands more IOPS than the EBS volume is provisioned for, leading to throttling and increased latency. Option C correctly identifies that insufficient provisioned IOPS is the most likely cause.

Answer

The instance's network bandwidth is saturated.

Answer

The instance's CPU is under-provisioned.

Answer

The EBS volume is not encrypted.

Question 5

An SAP system uses an NFS share from an EFS file system for transport files. Recently, the transport directory performance has degraded. Which change would most likely improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Enable Provisioned Throughput on the EFS file system.. Using Provisioned Throughput on EFS ensures consistent performance regardless of file system size. Option A is wrong because increasing burst credits only helps temporarily. Option C is wrong because FSx for Lustre is for high-performance computing, not general purpose NFS. Option D is wrong because moving to S3 would require application changes.

Answer

Increase the burst credit balance by creating more files.

Answer

Migrate the transport directory to Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 with an NFS mount via AWS Storage Gateway.

Question 6

An SAP Basis administrator is migrating an SAP ERP system from an on-premises environment to AWS. The system uses an SAP HANA database. The migration must have minimal downtime. The administrator plans to use SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to synchronize data to an AWS HANA instance. However, the network latency between on-premises and AWS is consistently around 50 ms. What should the administrator do to ensure that HSR can maintain synchronization without impacting source system performance?

Accepted Answer

Configure HSR in asynchronous mode with full sync disabled to avoid affecting source transaction performance.. With 50 ms network latency, synchronous replication would block source transactions while waiting for acknowledgment from the target, severely impacting performance. Asynchronous mode with full sync disabled allows HSR to send log buffers without waiting for the target to confirm, ensuring source system performance is unaffected while still maintaining eventual consistency for migration.

Answer

Use synchronous replication with a lower sync timeout setting to avoid blocking.

Answer

Keep synchronous replication but increase the replication timeout value in the HANA global.ini file.

Answer

Enable HANA delta merge operations during replication to reduce the amount of data transferred.

Question 7

A company runs SAP Business Suite on AWS. They plan to use the SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) connector to automate system copy and relocation. What is a prerequisite for using the AWS LaMa connector?

Accepted Answer

An IAM role with permissions for EC2, EBS, and CloudFormation actions. The AWS LaMa connector automates SAP system copy and relocation by orchestrating EC2, EBS, and CloudFormation actions. An IAM role with permissions for these services is required so that LaMa can programmatically manage infrastructure resources (e.g., stop/start instances, snapshot volumes, create CloudFormation stacks) without manual intervention. This role is assumed by the LaMa connector when executing workflows.

Answer

An EC2 Auto Scaling group configured for the SAP application tier

Answer

AWS Systems Manager managed instances for all SAP servers

Answer

SSH keys for all SAP instances to allow LaMa to connect

Question 8

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the database can be restored to any point in time within the last 48 hours with minimal data loss. Which backup strategy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Schedule daily full backups and hourly incremental log backups to Amazon S3 using Backint.. SAP HANA supports Backint integration with Amazon S3 for log backups, enabling point-in-time recovery (PITR) with minimal data loss. Daily full backups combined with hourly incremental log backups ensure that any transaction committed within the last 48 hours can be restored, meeting the RPO requirement of minimal data loss.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS snapshots every 6 hours.

Answer

Use AWS Backup with a daily backup plan.

Answer

Take weekly full backups and daily differential backups to Amazon S3.

Question 9

An SAP system on AWS experiences intermittent connectivity issues between the SAP Central Services (SCS) instance and the application servers. The SCS instance is in a private subnet in us-east-1a, and the application servers are spread across us-east-1a and us-east-1b. Security groups allow traffic on all required ports. What is the MOST likely cause of the intermittent connectivity?

Accepted Answer

The network ACLs are blocking the traffic.. Network ACLs are stateless and must explicitly allow both inbound and outbound traffic on ephemeral ports. If the outbound rules for the SCS subnet's NACL do not allow return traffic on high ports (e.g., 1024–65535), or if the application servers' subnet NACL blocks inbound traffic from the SCS instance, connections will intermittently fail. Security groups are stateful and automatically allow return traffic, but NACLs are not, making them the likely culprit for intermittent connectivity across different Availability Zones.

Answer

The route tables do not have a route for the SCS subnet.

Answer

The Internet Gateway is misconfigured.

Answer

The VPC peering connection is not established correctly.

Question 10

A company is migrating its SAP HANA database to AWS. Which instance type is specifically designed for SAP HANA and certified for production workloads?

Accepted Answer

x1e.xlarge. The x1e.xlarge instance is part of the AWS X1e family, which is specifically designed for memory-intensive workloads like SAP HANA and is certified by SAP for production deployments. SAP HANA requires large memory footprints and high memory-to-vCPU ratios, which the X1e instances provide with up to 3,904 GiB of memory and 128 vCPUs, meeting SAP's certification requirements.

Answer

c5.xlarge

Answer

r5.xlarge

Answer

t3.xlarge

Question 11

An SAP system administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance running SAP NetWeaver and set an alarm when it exceeds 90% for 5 minutes. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the correct service because it provides detailed monitoring of EC2 instances, including CPU utilization metrics, and allows you to set CloudWatch Alarms that trigger when a metric exceeds a specified threshold (e.g., 90%) for a given number of consecutive evaluation periods (e.g., 5 minutes). This is the native AWS service designed for performance monitoring and alerting.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

AWS Config

Question 12

An SAP administrator runs the AWS CLI command shown in the exhibit to check the status of a production HANA instance. The output shows the instance is running in us-east-1a. However, the SAP application team reports that the HANA database is not responding. What should the administrator check next to diagnose the issue?

Accepted Answer

The HANA database service is not running on the instance. The AWS CLI command only checks the EC2 instance state (e.g., 'running'), not the status of the HANA database service itself. Even if the instance is running, the HANA database service (hdbnameserver, hdbindexserver, etc.) may have crashed, failed to start, or been stopped. The administrator should SSH into the instance and run commands like 'systemctl status hdbindexserver' or 'sapcontrol -nr <instance_number> -function GetProcessList' to verify the HANA service status.

Answer

The EBS volumes are detached from the instance

Answer

The instance state is 'running' so no issue with the instance

Answer

The security group does not allow inbound traffic to the database port

Question 13

A company is running an SAP HANA database on an r5.8xlarge EC2 instance. The database experiences high memory pressure, and they want to add more memory without downtime. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Modify the instance type to r5.12xlarge while the instance is running.. You can modify the instance type of a running EC2 instance without stopping it, provided the new type is compatible with the current configuration. In this case, changing from r5.8xlarge to r5.12xlarge increases memory from 256 GiB to 384 GiB, and both are in the same instance family, supporting live resizing. This allows the SAP HANA database to add memory without downtime, addressing high memory pressure.

Answer

Use AWS License Manager to add more memory to the instance.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS for SAP HANA to automatically scale memory.

Answer

Stop the instance and change the instance type to u-6tb1.112xlarge.

Question 14

An SAP administrator is migrating an SAP Business Suite system from on-premises to AWS. The system uses an Oracle database that is 2 TB in size. The bandwidth between the on-premises data center and AWS is limited to 100 Mbps. The migration must be completed within a weekend (48 hours). The administrator decides to use AWS DMS for ongoing replication after an initial full load. However, the initial full load takes too long. What should the administrator do to accelerate the initial full load?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Snowball Edge to physically transfer the database backup to AWS, then restore and use DMS for ongoing replication.. The 2 TB database over a 100 Mbps link would take approximately 47 hours just for the transfer (2 TB * 8 / 100 Mbps / 3600 seconds ≈ 47.6 hours), leaving no time for restore and validation. AWS Snowball Edge provides a physical shipping alternative that bypasses network bandwidth constraints entirely, allowing the full load to be completed within the weekend. After restoring the backup from Snowball, AWS DMS can be used for ongoing replication of changes.

Answer

Disable encryption on the database backup to reduce transfer overhead.

Answer

Increase the size of the DMS replication instance to the largest available.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration to speed up the upload.

Question 15

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.

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