A customer has a functional requirement that states HR systems within a data center should...

C (Transparent firewalling):Transparent (Layer 2) firewalls operate at the data link layer and allow segmentation and inspection of intra-VLAN traffic without requiring changes to the existing IP addressing. This is ideal for legacy environments where IP addresses are hard-coded, while still providing fine-grained security policies between applications in the same subnet.

Other options explained:

A: Perimeter firewalls cannot segment east-west traffic within a VLAN.

B: VACLs provide basic filtering but are not as scalable or flexible as transparent firewalls for stateful inspection.

D: Routed firewalls require Layer 3 boundaries, which would conflict with hard-coded IP design.