Study guide for Exam AZ-120: Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads

Purpose of this document

This study guide should help you understand what to expect on the exam and includes a summary of the topics the exam might cover and links to additional resources. The information and materials in this document should help you focus your studies as you prepare for the exam.

Updates to the exam

Our exams are updated periodically to reflect skills that are required to perform a role. We have included two versions of the Skills Measured objectives depending on when you are taking the exam.

We always update the English language version of the exam first. Some exams are localized into other languages, and those are updated approximately eight weeks after the English version is updated. While Microsoft makes every effort to update localized versions as noted, there may be times when the localized versions of this exam are not updated on this schedule. Other available languages are listed in the Schedule Exam section of the Exam Details webpage. If the exam isn't available in your preferred language, you can request an additional 30 minutes to complete the exam.

Note

The bullets that follow each of the skills measured are intended to illustrate how we are assessing that skill. Related topics may be covered in the exam.

Note

Most questions cover features that are general availability (GA). The exam may contain questions on Preview features if those features are commonly used.

Skills measured as of October 11, 2024

Audience profile

As a candidate for this exam, you’re an architect or engineer who designs and manages the SAP landscape on Azure. Your responsibilities include:

• Implementing industry-specific standards for migrations and integrations.

• Ensuring the sustained operation of an SAP solution within the Azure environment.

You recommend services and adjust resources as appropriate for optimal:

• Resiliency

• Performance

• Scale

• Provision

• Size

• Monitoring

You partner with cloud administrators, cloud database administrators, and clients to implement solutions, including RISE with SAP. You manage SAP infrastructure by using:

• The Azure portal

• Azure Marketplace

• Azure Resource Manager templates

You should have extensive experience and knowledge of the SAP applications and databases including:

• SAP high-performance Analytic Appliance (HANA)

• SAP Business Suite

• SAP NetWeaver

You should also have experience with virtualization, cloud infrastructure, storage structures, high availability, backup, disaster recovery, data protection, and networking.

For this exam, we strongly recommend that candidates have an Azure Administrator Associate certification.

Skills at a glance

• Migrate SAP workloads to Azure (25–30%)

• Design and implement an infrastructure to support SAP workloads on Azure (25–30%)

• Design and implement high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) (20–25%)

• Maintain SAP workloads on Azure (20–25%)

Migrate SAP workloads to Azure (25–30%)

Identify requirements for target infrastructure

• Estimate target sizing for SAP workloads

• Identify supported scenarios for SAP deployments on Azure

• Identify compute, storage, and network requirements for SAP workloads

• Assess constraints imposed by subscription models and quota limits

• Identify software licensing requirements for target workloads

• Identify cost implications for target workloads

• Specify an Azure support plan for the target infrastructure

• Choose between lift and shift, lift-shift-migrate, and lift-shift-migrate to HANA

• Choose an appropriate SAP workload migration strategy and tools

Design and implement an Azure environment to support SAP workloads

• Design and implement authorization and access control for SAP workloads

• Design and implement governance and compliance by using Azure Policy

• Design and implement authentication for SAP workloads

• Design and implement authentication for SAP software as a service (SaaS) applications

• Design and implement a management hierarchy, including management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups

• Design Azure landing zones for SAP

Design and implement integration with SAP RISE

• Design networking for SAP RISE

• Implement networking for SAP RISE

• Design and implement Azure compute, network, and storage services with SAP RISE

• Design and implement integration of data management services such as data archiving

• Design and implement integration of identity and security services with SAP RISE

Design and implement an infrastructure to support SAP workloads on Azure (25–30%)

Design and implement a compute solution for SAP workloads

• Choose an SAP-certified Azure virtual machine for a given SAP workload

• Configure the Azure VM extension for SAP solutions

• Deploy an operating system by using an Azure Marketplace image

• Create a custom image and deploy it to an Azure virtual machine

• Automate a deployment of Azure virtual machines by using IaC, including Bicep and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates

• Automate a deployment by using the SAP on Azure Deployment Automation Framework

• Automate a deployment by using Azure Center for SAP solutions

Design and implement networking for SAP on Azure virtual machines

• Design and implement virtual networks and subnets

• Implement Accelerated Networking for Azure virtual machines

• Design and configure proximity placement groups

• Design networking to meet SAP workload latency requirements

• Design and implement network flow control

• Design and implement network security

• Design and implement service endpoints and private endpoints for Azure Storage

• Design name resolution for integration with Azure DNS

• Design and configure ExpressRoute for hybrid connectivity

Design and implement a storage solution for SAP on Azure virtual machines

• Choose a storage type

• Specify when to use disk striping and simple volumes

• Design for storage security considerations

• Design and implement data protection

• Design and implement caching for disks

• Configure Write Accelerator

• Configure encryption for storage, disks, and data

• Design and implement volumes by using Azure NetApp Files

• Design and implement volumes by using Azure Files

Design and implement high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) (20–25%)

Design and implement a high availability solution for SAP on Azure virtual machines

• Design for service-level agreement (SLA) considerations

• Design and deploy SAP workloads into availability sets and availability zones

• Design and implement load balancing for high availability

• Configure clustering for HANA and SAP Central Services (SCS)

• Configure clustering for SQL

• Configure Pacemaker and STONITH

• Configure an Azure fence agent or STONITH Block Device (SBD)

• Design and configure storage-level replication for SAP workloads

• Configure restart of SAP systems, instances, and HANA databases

Design and implement a disaster recovery solution for SAP on Azure virtual machines

• Design and implement an Azure Site Recovery strategy for an SAP infrastructure

• Design a disaster recovery solution with regional considerations

• Specify network configurations for disaster recovery

• Design a backup strategy to meet SLA requirements

• Implement policies for backups and snapshots

• Configure and validate snapshots and backups for SAP workloads

• Perform backup and restore

• Test disaster recovery

Maintain SAP workloads on Azure (20–25%)

Optimize performance and costs

• Optimize performance and costs for an SAP workload by using Azure Advisor recommendations

• Analyze and optimize network performance

• Optimize costs by configuring snoozing and deploying reserved instances

• Optimize performance and costs by resizing Azure virtual machines

• Optimize storage costs

• Optimize data performance by using archiving

• Optimize performance and costs of SAP application servers and databases

Monitor and maintain SAP on Azure

• Monitor Azure virtual machines by using Azure Monitor

• Monitor high availability by using Azure Monitor

• Monitor storage by using Azure Monitor

• Monitor networking by using Azure Monitor and Azure Network Watcher

• Configure Azure Monitor for SAP solutions

• Manage backups by using Azure Backup

• Start and stop SAP systems by using Azure Center for SAP solutions

• Manage virtual instances by using Azure Center for SAP solutions

• Implement the SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) connector for Azure

Study resources

We recommend that you train and get hands-on experience before you take the exam. We offer self-study options and classroom training as well as links to documentation, community sites, and videos.

Change log

The table below summarizes the changes between the current and previous version of the skills measured. The functional groups are in bold typeface followed by the objectives within each group. The table is a comparison between the previous and current version of the exam skills measured and the third column describes the extent of the changes.