Free HP HPE7-A07 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (Verified Extract from HPE Aruba Networking Switching Documentation)

VOQ (Virtual Output Queuing) is a hardware-based queuing mechanism used in the ArubaOS-CX architecture to prevent head-of-line blocking and minimize packet drops in high-throughput environments.

How VOQ Works:

Each ingress port maintains a separate queue for every egress port in the system.

When a packet arrives, it is placed in the ingress buffer corresponding to its destination egress port.

This structure ensures that traffic destined for one congested egress port does not block packets heading to other ports.

This architecture is critical in high-speed modular switches and aggregation cores (such as the Aruba 8400 and 10000 Series), allowing the fabric interconnect to forward traffic efficiently without dropping packets due to port congestion.

ArubaOS-CX Technical Extract:

“Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) provides per-egress-port queuing at ingress buffers, preventing head-of-line blocking and ensuring high throughput across the switch fabric. Each ingress queue corresponds to a specific egress port, allowing packets to be transmitted as soon as the egress port becomes available.”

Option Analysis:

A. Incorrect – Refers to priority marking (QoS), not VOQ operation.

B. Correct – VOQ provides ingress buffers with queues for each egress port, reducing dropped packets and head-of-line blocking.

C. Incorrect – VOQ is not related to LACP or VSX link aggregation.

D. Incorrect – VOQ does not dynamically allocate egress buffer space; it segregates ingress queues per egress destination.

Final Verified Answer: B

Reference Sources (HPE Aruba Official Materials):

Aruba AOS-CX Technical Architecture Overview – Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ)

Aruba 8400/10000 Series Switches Hardware and Performance Guide

Aruba Certified Switching Expert (ACSE) Study Guide – Switch Fabric and Queuing Mechanisms

Why C and D are correct (bridged traffic):

“In AOS 10 deployments that use mobility gateways, application/flow visibility and Client Insights for wireless clients are derived from gateway DPI and firewall session state. When an SSID is bridged at the AP (including mixed mode where a client is bridged), client data traffic does not traverse the gateway. Because the gateway does not see the user flows, flow attributes and network activity are not populated in Central for those clients.”

This applies to:

• C – SSID is bridged (all clients bypass the gateway).

• D – SSID is mixed mode but the affected clients are bridged (those clients bypass the gateway).

Why A, B, and E are not the best answers:

“When clients are tunneled (including mixed-mode clients that are tunneled) to the gateway, the gateway’s stateful firewall and DPI engine observe the sessions and export flow/app data to Central.”

Thus A is not a reason for missing data.

“Client VLANs marked untrusted are evaluated by the gateway firewall/DPI and support visibility. Marking a VLAN trusted bypasses firewall enforcement, but flow visibility for tunneled WLAN clients is based on gateway DPI; the primary reason Central shows no flow attributes is that the traffic never reached the gateway (bridged path).”

Therefore B/E are not the primary causes of this symptom in the scenario described.

References of HPE Aruba Networking Switching documents or Study Guide:

Aruba AOS 10 Gateway and WLAN Configuration Guides — “Tunneled vs Bridged SSIDs and impact on gateway DPI/visibility.”

Aruba Central Operations Guide — “Client Insights data sources from mobility gateways.”

Aruba Policy Enforcement and Application Visibility — “Gateway DPI and stateful firewall as the source for app/flow telemetry for wireless clients.”

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (Verified Extract from HPE Aruba Networking Central and ClearPass Documentation)

RAPIDS (Rogue AP Detection System) in Aruba Central or AirWave works by correlating information between wireless and wired infrastructure to detect rogue devices and identify their wired connectivity location.

When Aruba Central detects a rogue AP or interfering device, it uses wired-side discovery mechanisms such as LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) to trace the device’s physical connection.

If the managed switch supports LLDP, it advertises and records neighbor information, including device type, MAC address, and connected port. Aruba Central queries this LLDP neighbor table from managed switches to determine the exact switch port where the rogue AP is physically connected.

Aruba Central and RAPIDS Documentation Extract:

“Aruba Central correlates rogue or interfering AP MAC addresses with wired-side discovery data. Using LLDP neighbor table information from managed switches, Central identifies the physical switch port where the rogue device is connected.”

Other options such as the MAC address table can show where a MAC is learned, but LLDP provides the direct, authenticated neighbor relationship that allows Aruba Central to accurately identify the rogue AP connection point and display it in the dashboard.

Option Analysis:

A. Incorrect – Device profiling identifies endpoint types, not wired connection ports for rogue AP detection.

B. Incorrect – MAC tables alone don’t provide direct port-device mapping context for rogue detection in Central.

C. ✅ Correct – Aruba Central uses LLDP neighbor data from managed switches to map rogue or interfering APs to specific switch ports.

D. Incorrect – AP MAC address tables exist in controllers or APs, not in Central’s rogue-tracking mechanism.

✅ Final Verified Answer: C

???? Reference Sources (HPE Aruba Official Materials):

Aruba Central Administration and RAPIDS Configuration Guide

ArubaOS-Switch and CX Network Management Fundamentals – LLDP Discovery Integration

Aruba Certified Network Security Professional (ACNSP) Study Guide – Rogue AP Detection and Wired Correlation

Graceful Restart (GR) allows a router to continue forwarding packets while it restarts its OSPF process. The GR helper role on AOS-CX switches supports routers during this process. OSPF routers listen for Grace-LSAs to identify neighbors undergoing a graceful restart, maintaining adjacencies with those routers to allow uninterrupted forwarding.

default GBP role = GBP role ID = 0

infrastructure GBP role = GBP role ID = 2

user-defined GBP role = GBP role ID = <100-8191>

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of HPE Aruba Networking Switching:

Accurate and trusted time on gateways is essential for audit logs. Aruba gateways and AOS-CX switches support NTP authentication, where the device and the NTP server share cryptographic keys (key-id with MD5/SHA-1 depending on platform). The device accepts time updates only from servers that successfully authenticate, protecting against spoofed NTP responses and time-shifting attacks.

Exact extract:

“Configure NTP authentication to verify time sources. Define an authentication key, mark it as trusted, and associate it with the NTP server. The device will synchronize time only with authenticated servers.”

“Accurate logging relies on NTP. Enabling authentication helps prevent malicious or accidental tampering with system time.”

Thus, enabling and configuring NTP authentication directly secures the time clock against attacks, making B correct.

Option A would block time synchronization; C (a generic ACL) does not provide cryptographic validation; D changes only display/timezone and does not secure the source of time.

References of HPE Aruba Networking Switching documents or Study Guide:

ArubaOS 10 Gateway Management and Security Guide — “Configuring NTP authentication (keys, trusted key, server association).”

Aruba AOS-CX System Management Guide — “Securing NTP and its impact on event/audit logs.”

To maximize wired bandwidth utilization, especially when multiple APs are terminating on mobility gateways, it's best practice to aggregate physical ports into a port channel. This provides redundancy and increased bandwidth by combining the throughput of multiple ports.

In WLANs, multicast frames are transmitted at the lowest basic rate, so a single multicast stream can consume significant airtime and slow the entire BSS, impacting clients that did not even join the group.

Dynamic Multicast Optimization (DMO) converts multicast streams to per-client unicast, allowing the AP to use the highest supported unicast data rate and reliable retransmission—this prevents the low-rate multicast airtime penalty.

Multicast Transmission Optimization (MTO) raises the transmit rate for any remaining multicast/broadcast that must still be sent as multicast, further reducing airtime.

The captures show multicast sent as 802.11 data at a low rate; enabling DMO + MTO addresses exactly this symptom in Aruba deployments.

In HPE Aruba Networking (AOS-CX and AOS-Switch) OSPF implementation, the routing behavior for external routes (Type 5 LSAs) distinguishes between two types of external advertisements:

E1 (Type-1 external) — The total path cost is calculated as the sum of the internal cost to reach the ASBR (Autonomous System Boundary Router) plus the external cost as advertised in the LSA.

E2 (Type-2 external) — The external cost is considered independent of the internal OSPF path cost to reach the ASBR. Thus, the metric used is only the external cost from the LSA.

When both an E1 and an E2 route exist to the same external destination, OSPF gives preference to the E1 route, regardless of metric values, because the E1 route represents a more accurate total cost to the destination (including internal OSPF cost).

Extract (as per HPE Aruba OSPF Technical Overview and AOS-CX Routing Guide):

“When both Type-1 (E1) and Type-2 (E2) external LSAs for the same destination are present, the router always prefers the Type-1 route. Type-1 routes include both internal and external costs in the total metric, while Type-2 routes use only the external cost. The E1 path is therefore considered more precise and is selected as the preferred route.”

This is consistent across Aruba’s OSPF implementation and follows standard OSPF behavior as defined by the protocol (RFC 2328).

Therefore, when both E1 and E2 routes are available and have the same overall cost, the router will always prefer the E1 path.

Including the root and intermediate certificates in the captive portal certificate for the gateway will resolve the error seen during the login action after successful registration. This is necessary to ensure the SSL/TLS handshake can be completed successfully, as the client browser needs to validate the entire certificate chain.