Question

Difficulty: MediumResilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

A network architect is designing a high-availability edge network infrastructure for a regional operational facility. The architecture must ensure continuous default gateway availability for local internal hosts and dynamic, redundant routing across two independent upstream Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Which of the following resilience mechanisms should the architect deploy to fulfill these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to present a shared virtual default gateway address across redundant local routersAnswer
  2. B
    Hardware RAID 10 array configuration on the internal storage drives of the edge routers
  3. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) multi-homing to dynamically announce routes and balance traffic across both ISP linksAnswer
  4. D
    Weekly offsite cold-site system backup tape rotations for the edge router configuration files

Answer

The architect should deploy Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to supply a virtual default gateway for local hosts and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) multi-homing to manage dynamic path redundancy across external ISP connections.
High availability at the network layer requires redundancy at both the internal first-hop gateway level and the external WAN routing level. Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) groups local physical routers together under a virtual IP address, providing immediate gateway failover for clients on the subnet. Meanwhile, BGP multi-homing negotiates dynamic routing across separate service providers, enabling path failover and traffic distribution over external connections.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze local gateway availability requirements.
Identified that local hosts require a single resilient gateway IP address that remains reachable if a router fails.
First-hop redundancy protocols like VRRP enable multiple physical routers to share a single virtual IP and MAC address, facilitating seamless failover.
2
Analyze external WAN path redundancy requirements.
Identified that outbound traffic needs dynamic failover across two separate upstream ISPs.
BGP multi-homing maintains active routing tables with both service providers, dynamically redirecting traffic away from an unresponsive ISP link.
3
Evaluate invalid options based on scope mismatch.
Eliminated disk array mirroring (RAID 10) and offsite tape backups.
Local disk redundancy protects against drive crashes on a single host, and offline backups support disaster recovery restoration, but neither provides active high-availability network path redundancy.

Key Concept

First-hop router redundancy and dynamic multi-homing routing protocols for network-level resilience and high availability.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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