Free Fortinet FCP_ZCS_AD-7.4 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers

In a FortiGate active-active HA deployment in Azure, synchronization between instances is achieved using:

FortiGate Clustering Protocol (FGCP) – This is the primary protocol used to synchronize configuration and session information between HA peers.

Heartbeat interfaces – These interfaces are specifically configured to exchange HA state and sync data between the FortiGate VMs, ensuring cluster consistency.

The FortiGate VM and the Windows Server VM are in different subnets but within the same Production virtual network, which means they can communicate by default unless restricted. Azure allows ICMP between subnets, but Windows VMs have ICMP blocked by default in their firewall settings. Therefore, the likely reason for the ping failure is that the Windows Server’s firewall is blocking ICMP (ping) traffic.

The trace output shows only one hop to reach 10.0.2.4, indicating that the destination is in the same Azure virtual network (VNet) as the Windows VM. Since the VM’s IP is 10.0.1.4 and the destination is 10.0.2.4, they are in different subnets, but Azure allows direct routing between subnets within the same VNet without additional hops.

Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated private connections between on-premises infrastructure and Azure data centers, bypassing the public internet. This results in more predictable latency, higher reliability, and better security, making it ideal for mission-critical workloads.

In an active-active FortiGate ELB/ILB deployment, the inbound NAT rules configured on the external load balancer are used to allow administrative access (e.g., HTTPS, SSH) to the individual FortiGate VMs. Since the public IP is associated with the load balancer, NAT rules are required to map specific ports to backend FortiGate instances for management access.

For VMs in the 10.0.1.0/26 subnet to access the internet through the FortiGate VM, their default gateway must be changed to the internal IP address of the FortiGate’s NIC in that subnet (e.g., LAB1-FGT-A-Nic2). This ensures traffic is routed through FortiGate for inspection and NAT, rather than directly using Azure’s default system routes.

Azure Firewall Premium includes advanced features not available in the Standard tier, such as enhanced URL filtering and web categories, TLS inspection, IDPS (intrusion detection and prevention system), and support for private certificate authorities. These enable more granular and secure traffic inspection and control.

The local network gateway in Azure represents the on-premises VPN device (such as FortiGate) and defines the on-premises public IP address and the address prefixes of the on-premises network. This is essential for configuring site-to-site VPN connections from Azure to FortiGate.

The route server subnet in Azure is a dedicated subnet that hosts the Azure Route Server, which functions as the hub for dynamic routing information exchange between Azure virtual networks and BGP-enabled network virtual appliances (NVAs) or on-premises routers. It enables seamless and centralized route propagation.

Enhanced protection for application and data in a single Azure region – Availability Zones provide physical separation of infrastructure within a single Azure region, protecting against datacenter-level failures.

Protect applications and data through high availability with fault isolation and redundancy – They offer fault isolation and redundancy, enabling high availability for applications and services by distributing them across multiple zones within the same region.