The correct design is to deploy two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance, using separate Cloud Routers. This configuration achieves true high availability cloud VPN design because it eliminates single points of failure at both the regional and gateway levels; if one GCP region or gateway goes down, the other region’s tunnel remains active, and using separate Cloud Routers with BGP enables automatic failover and dynamic route propagation. On the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer exam, this scenario tests your understanding of multi-region redundancy versus single-region HA, where a common trap is choosing a single gateway with multiple tunnels—that design protects against appliance failure but not regional outages. Remember the memory tip: “Two regions, two routers, two tunnels” ensures your VPN survives both a cloud region failure and an on-premises appliance failure simultaneously.
PCNE Practice Question: Designing, planning, and prototyping a GCP network
This PCNE practice question tests your understanding of designing, planning, and prototyping a gcp network. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company needs to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud using a VPN with high availability. They have two VPN appliances on-premises in different locations. What is the best design on the GCP side?
Clue words in this question
Noticing these words before you look at the options changes how you read each choice.
Clue: "best"
Why it matters: Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Deploy two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance, using separate Cloud Routers.
Option D is correct because it provides true high availability by using two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance. This design ensures that if one region or gateway fails, traffic can still flow through the other region, meeting the requirement for high availability. Using separate Cloud Routers allows for dynamic routing with BGP, enabling automatic failover and load balancing across the two tunnels.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Deploy one Cloud VPN gateway with two tunnels to both on-premises appliances, using one Cloud Router.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Router and gateway are single points of failure.
✗
Deploy two Cloud VPN gateways in the same region, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance, using separate Cloud Routers.
Why it's wrong here
Region failure affects both gateways.
✗
Deploy one Cloud VPN gateway with a single tunnel to one on-premises appliance.
Why it's wrong here
Single point of failure; not HA.
✓
Deploy two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance, using separate Cloud Routers.
Why this is correct
Provides regional redundancy and full HA.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "best" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often assume two tunnels from a single gateway provide high availability, but they overlook that the gateway itself is a single point of failure; true high availability requires redundancy at both the gateway and region level.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Cloud VPN supports dynamic routing via BGP, which allows each tunnel to exchange routes with the on-premises network. By placing gateways in different regions, you achieve geographic redundancy, which is critical for disaster recovery scenarios. Under the hood, each Cloud VPN gateway is a regional resource, and using separate Cloud Routers ensures independent BGP sessions, so a failure in one router does not affect the other.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Designing, planning, and prototyping a GCP network — This question tests Designing, planning, and prototyping a GCP network — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Deploy two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance, using separate Cloud Routers. — Option D is correct because it provides true high availability by using two Cloud VPN gateways in different regions, each with a tunnel to a different on-premises appliance. This design ensures that if one region or gateway fails, traffic can still flow through the other region, meeting the requirement for high availability. Using separate Cloud Routers allows for dynamic routing with BGP, enabling automatic failover and load balancing across the two tunnels.
What should I do if I get this PCNE question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Are there clue words in this question I should notice?
Yes — watch for: "best". Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
About these practice questions
Courseiva creates original exam-style practice questions with explanations and wrong-answer analysis. It does not publish real exam questions, exam dumps, or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is designing a hybrid network between their on-premises data center and Google Cloud. They need high availability for traffic between the two environments and want to use Cloud VPN with dynamic routing. Which configuration ensures that if one VPN tunnel fails, traffic automatically fails over to the other tunnel without manual intervention?
medium
A.Create one VPN tunnel and a static route with next hop set to the VPN gateway.
B.Use Cloud Interconnect instead of VPN, and configure two VLAN attachments.
✓ C.Create two VPN tunnels to two separate peer VPN gateways on-premises, and use Cloud Router with BGP to advertise routes from both tunnels.
D.Create two VPN tunnels to the same peer VPN gateway, and configure equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing with static routes.
Why C: Option C is correct because it uses two VPN tunnels to separate on-premises peer gateways with Cloud Router and BGP. BGP automatically handles failover by withdrawing routes from the failed tunnel and advertising routes via the healthy tunnel, ensuring traffic fails over without manual intervention. This meets the high availability and dynamic routing requirements specified in the question.
Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
Question Discussion
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This PCNE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PCNE exam.
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