For all those who don't know him here's this post, Introducing the Fortinet Virtual Appliance, the Fortigate-VM firewall, in virtual machine format will provide us with all the advantages of having the Fortigate firewall virtualized in our network (high availability, Cross-network FW, Backup/Replica…) Of course,, only for VMware vSphere environments!

This would be a typical scheme in a virtual infrastructure with Fortinet virtual products:

– Fortigate-VM: Virtual firewall appliance.
– FortiWeb-VM: Web Application Firewall Virtual Appliance.
– FortiClient: AV/VPN/AntiSPAM/AntiSpyware Client…
– FortiMail-VM: Virtual Anti-Spam Security Appliance, virus…
– FortiAnalyzer-VM: Virtual appliance for LOG analysis and reporting.
– FortiManager-VM: Virtual appliance for centralized management of Fortinet products.

We downloaded the appliance in OVF format from the Fortinet firmware download website: ftp://support.fortinet.com/FortiGate, We will choose the version, MR and patch level that interests us. We import it into our virtual infrastructure as usual,

When importing it, we can select the 10 network legs and associate them with the various VMware virtual networks, later we can remove the unused NIC's, as well as adding more if necessary. Ditto with the rest of the virtual hardware (minimal 2 vCPU, max 8vCPU, minimum 512Mb of RAM and maximum 3Gb of RAM). As we download the VM we will have 14 Trial days (with 5 Maximum Rules!).

Turn on the virtual machine, and we enter as an admin and without a password.

We will configure the Fortigate by console, or at least configure an IP address to be able to configure and manage it via the web.

This would be the presentation via the web, as yet another firewall!