PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
An SAP system on AWS needs to be highly available across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). The SAP Central Services (ASCS) and the database are both critical. Which architecture should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse AWS-managed services like RDS Multi-AZ with SAP-certified HA solutions, failing to recognize that SAP HANA requires native replication and that ASCS must be clustered, not simply load-balanced.
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 ASCS with a cluster across two AZs, and use HANA System Replication across two AZs.
SAP ASCS requires a cluster (e.g., Pacemaker with SBD fencing) across two AZs to provide failover for the central services, while HANA System Replication (HSR) synchronously replicates the database to a secondary AZ for automatic failover. This dual-cluster architecture ensures both critical components remain highly available, meeting SAP's certified HA patterns on AWS.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic across AZs.
Why it's wrong here
ALB provides HA for web tier, not for ASCS or database.
- ✓
Deploy ASCS with a cluster across two AZs, and use HANA System Replication across two AZs.
Why this is correct
This provides HA for both ASCS and database across AZs.
- ✗
Place all components in a single AZ to avoid cross-AZ latency.
Why it's wrong here
Single AZ is a single point of failure.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for the database and a single ASCS instance.
Why it's wrong here
RDS Multi-AZ is for databases supported by RDS, not SAP HANA typically.
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