PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company is running SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a high-availability setup using SAP HANA System Replication and a Pacemaker cluster. The cluster consists of two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, each with an EBS volume for HANA data. The cluster uses a virtual IP address (VIP) managed by the AWS Route 53 health check and failover mechanism. During a recent failover test, the secondary node took over as primary, but the application was unable to connect to the database for several minutes. The investigation reveals that the VIP did not update correctly. The company wants to ensure fast and reliable VIP failover. What should the team do to improve the failover time?
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
✓
Place the SAP HANA database behind an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) and use the NLB's TCP health checks to route traffic to the active instance.
Using an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) as a database endpoint provides a static IP that can be redirected to the active HANA node. The NLB performs TCP health checks at layer 4 and can detect failure within seconds, rerouting traffic to the healthy secondary instance almost immediately. Option A is incorrect because increasing DNS TTL makes failover slower, not faster. Option B is incorrect because reassigning an Elastic IP requires API calls that can take tens of seconds. Option C is incorrect because even with a reduced health check interval and low TTL, DNS propagation still introduces delays, and Route 53 health checks are not as fast as NLB health checks.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the DNS TTL to 300 seconds to reduce lookups and rely on the Pacemaker VIP update.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing TTL makes the failure recovery slower because clients will cache the old IP longer.
- ✗
Assign an Elastic IP address to the active node and use a script to reassign it during failover.
Why it's wrong here
Elastic IP reassignment involves API calls and can take tens of seconds, plus the time to update ARP caches.
- ✗
Reduce the Route 53 health check interval to 10 seconds and lower the DNS TTL to 60 seconds.
Why it's wrong here
Even with reduced intervals, DNS caching and propagation delays can still cause minutes of downtime.
- ✓
Place the SAP HANA database behind an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) and use the NLB's TCP health checks to route traffic to the active instance.
Why this is correct
NLB provides fast health checks (every 10 seconds) and immediate traffic rerouting without DNS delays, enabling sub-second failover.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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