PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company is running SAP Business Suite on AWS. The system includes a central services (ASCS) instance, a primary application server (PAS), and a database server running SAP HANA. The company recently experienced an outage when the EC2 instance hosting the ASCS instance failed due to a hardware issue. The system was down for 4 hours while the IT team manually recovered the ASCS instance from an AMI. The company wants to implement a highly available ASCS instance with automatic failover and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes. The system is currently running in a single Availability Zone. What should the company do to meet these requirements?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Deploy a second ASCS instance in a different Availability Zone, set up SAP enqueue replication, and use a virtual IP address with Route 53 health checks for failover.
Deploying a second ASCS instance in a different Availability Zone with SAP enqueue replication and a virtual IP address managed by Route 53 health checks provides automatic failover with an RTO under 15 minutes. This setup ensures that if the primary ASCS instance fails, the standby instance takes over quickly, maintaining enqueue state and minimizing downtime. Option A is wrong because an Application Load Balancer is not designed for SAP ASCS failover; it would not handle enqueue replication or virtual hostname. Option B is wrong because an Auto Scaling group with lifecycle hooks does not provide application-level clustering or enqueue state replication. Option D is wrong because CloudWatch EC2 Auto Recovery only restarts the instance in the same Availability Zone and does not address enqueue replication or cross-AZ failover, resulting in an RTO longer than 15 minutes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Place the ASCS instance behind an Application Load Balancer and configure health checks.
Why it's wrong here
Placing ASCS behind an ALB is not appropriate because ASCS uses a virtual IP and enqueue replication; ALB does not manage the enqueue state or provide the necessary failover mechanism.
- ✗
Configure an Auto Scaling group for the ASCS instance with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 2, and use a lifecycle hook to attach an Elastic IP.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling group with lifecycle hook does not provide SAP HA; it does not handle enqueue table replication or virtual hostname failover.
- ✓
Deploy a second ASCS instance in a different Availability Zone, set up SAP enqueue replication, and use a virtual IP address with Route 53 health checks for failover.
Why this is correct
This is the correct approach: deploy a second ASCS in another AZ, use SAP enqueue replication, and use Route 53 health checks with a virtual IP to achieve automatic failover with RTO <15 minutes.
- ✗
Enable CloudWatch EC2 Auto Recovery on the ASCS instance and configure it to start a new instance in a different AZ.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch EC2 Auto Recovery can restart the instance but only in the same AZ and does not maintain enqueue state, so RTO would be longer and cross-AZ failover is not achieved.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 1,616 original PAS-C01 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PAS-C01 exam.