A large organization uses Palo Alto Networks VM-Series firewalls deployed across multiple availability zones in Microsoft Azure. These are managed by an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) and integrated with an Azure Load Balancer for high availability (HA) traffic inspection within a Transit VNet.
The security team needs to perform a critical PAN-OS software upgrade across the entire fleet of firewalls with the requirement of minimal application downtime.
Following Palo Alto Networks best practices for highly available cloud deployments, what is the recommended approach for safely performing this software upgrade with the least downtime?

• A. Provision a new, parallel VMSS with the new PAN-OS version, validate it, and redirect traffic from the old VMSS to the new one
• B. Use Azure Update Manager to push the PAN-OS upgrade package directly to all firewall instances simultaneously during a scheduled maintenance window
• C. Configure Azure Load Balancer probes to handle the health check failover during upgrades
• D. Update the image in an Azure VMSS and then initiate an upgrade of the instances

An organization wants to modernize its legacy branch architecture. The existing architecture is rigid, complex, and ill-suited for a cloud-first strategy, creating high operational costs and latency.
- The four core data centers are strategically located in Dallas, Toronto, London and Tokyo, and they are interconnected by a dedicated MPLS backbone providing reliable connectivity but incurring significant costs and offering limited bandwidth scalability.
- Branches rely on MPLS or site-to-site VPN to connect to the nearest geographical data center.
- All internet-bound traffic from the branches is backhauled to the data center egress firewalls.
This creates latency for SaaS applications and increases bandwidth strain on the MPLS links.
The organization requires a proposal for a new WAN architecture for branch connectivity with the goal of improving security posture and SaaS application access as well as supporting local internet breakout for all branch devices, including IoT.
Which two implementations will achieve the goal of modernizing the branch architecture?
(Choose two.)

• A. SSE with Prisma Access for mobile users and service connections
• B. SASE with Prisma Access for remote networks and service connections
• C. NGFW at each branch with Large Scale VPN (LSVPN) for data center access and Direct Internet Access (DIA)
• D. SD-WAN using on-premises NGFWs for Direct Internet Access (DIA)

A global organization is modernizing its data center and private cloud infrastructure. The environment consists of:
- A Nutanix AHV cluster hosting critical east-west application workloads
- A VMware ESXi cluster with multi-socket hosts, supporting high-throughput workloads (>10 Gbps)
- A new pair of PA-5450 firewalls to secure the perimeter and handle encrypted traffic inspection at scale
- Strict performance service-level agreements (SLAs) for both north-south and east-west flows, with heavy reliance on TLS 1.3 and IPSec
- A Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environment on KVM to provide high-performance security services to maximize packet throughput and minimize latency The chief architect is tasked with ensuring that the firewall design avoids hypervisor contention optimizes non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and uses hardware features for encrypted traffic.
VM-Series on Nutanix AHV - Resource Allocation
- Because the Nutanix cluster is already heavily used, the architect's main concern is preventing performance degradation of the virtual firewall. Thin provisioning or ballooning could introduce latency and unpredictability which is unacceptable for a security-sensitive workload.
VM-Series on VMware ESXi - NUMA and vCPU Placement
- In the VMware ESXi environment, the architect is deploying VM-Series for workloads pushing >10 Gbps. Assigning vCPUs across NUMA nodes or oversubscribing cores would create latency due to cross-socket memory access and scheduling delays. Similarly, dedicating logical hypethreads does not provide the deterministic data plane performance required.
Operational Integration and High Availability
- With performance guaranteed by correct hypervisor and hardware provisioning, the architect also considers high availability (HA). VM-Series pairs are deployed in active/passive HA across Nutanix and VMware clusters, while PA-5450s form the data center's north-south secure perimeter deployment. This ensures resilience without introducing unnecessary east-west inspection bottlenecks.
- The recommendation must be a scalable, high-performance firewall deployment aligned with enterprise SLAs and the CISO's encrypted traffic concerns.
Which PAN-OS feature will meet the CISO's need for north-south traffic inspection?

• A. High-density DAC/QSFP ports for flexible network connectivity
• B. Dedicated out-of-band management port for separating management and data traffic
• C. Dedicated hardware crypto engines for offloading SSL/TLS decryption and IPSec processing
• D. Dual redundant, hot-swappable power supplies for HA

An architect is reviewing a use case with the following requirements:
- Visibility on the health of an end user's path for the five most
critical applications
- Metrics on the impact of endpoint health for application
- Centralized call quality analytics from Zoom video conferencing
solution
- Insights into the supporting protocols, such as DNS
- Support 600 users on Windows desktops in a single sales office
Which solution should be recommended to meet these requirements?

• A. Remote networks with ADEM enabled and an ION device
• B. GlobalProtect with a Prisma Access portal configured and ADEM enabled
• C. Prisma Browser or the Prisma Browser extension with RUM metrics
• D. Prisma SD-WAN using the native application dashboard and link quality monitoring