PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on AWS. The BW system uses a single HANA database instance on an r5.12xlarge EC2 instance with 4 EBS io1 volumes for data. The company has noticed that during peak data loads, the CPU utilization on the HANA instance reaches 90%. An SAP consultant recommends increasing the CPU capacity. The company wants to minimize costs and avoid over-provisioning. What is the most cost-effective solution to increase CPU capacity for the HANA instance?
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
✓
Change the EC2 instance type to a larger size in the r5 family, such as r5.16xlarge, to add more vCPUs.
The simplest and most cost-effective way to increase CPU capacity is to resize the EC2 instance to a larger instance type within the same family (e.g., r5.16xlarge or r5.24xlarge). This provides more vCPUs without needing to change the architecture. Option B is incorrect because increasing EBS volume IOPS does not add CPU capacity. Option C is incorrect because launching additional HANA instances for scale-out is complex and more expensive. Option D is incorrect because using a different instance family (e.g., compute-optimized) may require reconfiguration and is not as straightforward as resizing within the same family.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Change the EC2 instance type to a larger size in the r5 family, such as r5.16xlarge, to add more vCPUs.
Why this is correct
Instance resizing is simple and cost-effective.
- ✗
Increase the provisioned IOPS on the EBS volumes to improve I/O performance.
Why it's wrong here
This does not increase CPU capacity.
- ✗
Deploy additional HANA worker nodes and configure a scale-out system.
Why it's wrong here
Scale-out is more expensive and complex.
- ✗
Migrate the HANA instance to a compute-optimized instance family, such as c5.
Why it's wrong here
Changing instance family may require reconfiguration.
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