Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

You manage a hybrid environment with an on-premises datacenter connected to Azure using ExpressRoute (private peering). The on-premises network uses 10.20.0.0/16, but a newly acquired company already uses 10.20.0.0/16 in Azure across multiple VNets. You must enable connectivity between on-premises and the acquired company’s Azure workloads over ExpressRoute without renumbering either side. The solution must be scalable across multiple VNets and minimize operational overhead. What should you implement?

Your company uses a dual ExpressRoute setup for resiliency. You have two ExpressRoute circuits in different peering locations connected to the same on-premises network. Each circuit terminates on its own ExpressRoute gateway in separate hub VNets (Hub-A and Hub-B). Spoke VNets are peered to both hubs for redundancy. During a failover test, you notice asymmetric routing: outbound traffic from Spoke-1 to on-premises exits via Hub-A, but return traffic from on-premises arrives via Hub-B, causing stateful firewall drops in Hub-A. You need to enforce symmetric routing through the same hub for both directions without removing redundancy. What is the best solution?

You are designing connectivity for a multi-region Azure landing zone. Requirements: (1) Centralized inspection for all east-west and north-south traffic, (2) minimal route-table management in spokes, (3) support for both Azure Firewall and third-party NVA insertion, and (4) ability to scale to hundreds of VNets across regions. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A security team reports that a PaaS service integrated using Private Endpoint is intermittently unreachable from workloads in a peered VNet. The Private Endpoint is in VNet-A, and the calling workloads are in VNet-B. The DNS zone privatelink.service.contoso is linked only to VNet-A. In VNet-B, you use custom DNS servers (not Azure-provided) and conditional forwarders are configured to Azure DNS (168.63.129.16). Name resolution from VNet-B returns the public IP of the service. What is the most likely root cause?

You deploy Azure Firewall in a hub VNet. Spoke VNets are peered to the hub and use UDRs that send 0.0.0.0/0 to Azure Firewall. You then enable forced tunneling from the hub to on-premises through an ExpressRoute gateway for all internet-bound traffic. After the change, spoke workloads cannot reach some Microsoft public endpoints required for platform operations (for example, Azure control plane dependencies) even though the firewall allows outbound. What should you do to best address this while keeping forced tunneling?

You operate a hub-and-spoke topology with Azure Route Server (ARS) in the hub. A third-party NVA pair advertises 0.0.0.0/0 to ARS to provide centralized egress. Separately, the ExpressRoute gateway propagates on-premises routes (10.0.0.0/8) into the hub. A spoke VM intermittently routes traffic to on-premises via the NVA instead of the ExpressRoute gateway, causing suboptimal routing and occasional drops. There are no UDRs on the spoke subnets. What is the most likely explanation?

You publish an internal API using Azure Application Gateway (WAF v2) with a private frontend. The API is consumed from on-premises over ExpressRoute. Requirements: (1) preserve the original client IP for application logging, (2) do not terminate TLS on the backend service, and (3) enforce OWASP rules at the gateway. Which configuration meets all requirements?

You are troubleshooting an Azure Load Balancer (Standard) with HA Ports enabled for an NVA active/active pair. The frontend is internal, and the backend pool contains two NVAs. Health probes are configured on TCP port 5000 and show both NVAs as healthy. However, flows from a spoke VNet to on-premises intermittently fail, and packet captures show that return traffic sometimes comes back through a different NVA than the one that received the forward flow. What should you change to ensure flow symmetry for stateful inspection?

You deploy Azure Firewall Premium and configure TLS inspection for outbound HTTPS from a subnet. After enabling inspection, some applications fail with certificate validation errors while others work. The applications that fail are legacy and do not support enterprise trust store updates. You must keep TLS inspection for most traffic but allow these legacy apps to reach specific FQDNs without inspection, with the least security risk. What should you do?

Users report that connections from on-premises to an Azure VM occasionally stall for ~20 seconds and then recover. The VM is behind an Azure Standard Internal Load Balancer. You verify NSGs allow the traffic and the load balancer probe is healthy. Connection Monitor shows sporadic SNAT port exhaustion warnings on a NAT gateway attached to an unrelated subnet in the same VNet. You suspect ephemeral port pressure and want to confirm whether the load balancer is performing SNAT for outbound connections from the backend instances. What is the best next step to validate the root cause using Azure-native tools?