FCP_ZCS_AD-7.4 FCP - Azure Cloud Security 7.4 Administrator Questions and Answers

Using FortiGate at both ends of a site-to-site IPsec VPN tunnel provides the advantage of applying consistent security policies, configurations, and management tools across both the on-premises and Azure environments. This simplifies policy enforcement, improves operational efficiency, and ensures uniform threat protection.

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 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 first and most direct diagnostic step is to verify the BGP peering status on both the FortiGate VM and Azure Route Server. If BGP peering is not established or is in an idle or down state, route propagation will fail. This check confirms whether the two systems are communicating and exchanging routes as expected.

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.

Azure does not allow the deployment of virtual machines (VMs) in a gateway subnet. The gateway subnet is specifically reserved for Azure VPN Gateway or ExpressRoute Gateway instances, and deploying other resources in it can cause gateway deployment or operation failures.

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.