NSE7 Advanced Networking and SD-WAN Practice Question
A FortiGate administrator wants to enable load balancing for equal-cost paths to the same destination. The FortiGate has two equal-cost routes via two different next-hop routers. Which feature should the admin enable to load balance traffic across both paths?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse SD-WAN load balancing with ECMP, but SD-WAN is a separate overlay technology that requires SD-WAN zones and performance SLA rules, whereas ECMP is a simple, direct routing-table feature for equal-cost paths without any overlay or application-awareness.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path)
ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path) is the correct feature because it enables a FortiGate to distribute traffic across multiple equal-cost routes to the same destination. When the routing table contains two or more routes with identical administrative distance and metric, ECMP automatically load-balances sessions across those paths using a hash-based algorithm (e.g., source-destination IP hash), without requiring additional configuration beyond enabling the feature globally or per-VDOM.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection)
Why it's wrong here
BFD is used for fast failure detection, not load balancing.
- ✓
ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path)
Why this is correct
ECMP distributes traffic across multiple routes with the same metric and administrative distance.
- ✗
Policy-based routing
Why it's wrong here
PBR can direct traffic based on policies but does not load balance across equal-cost routes by itself.
- ✗
SD-WAN load balancing
Why it's wrong here
SD-WAN load balancing is used for multiple WAN interfaces, not for equal-cost routing paths.
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