We’ve talked lots about FortiGate firewall appliances. But did you know that Fortinet features virtual firewalls as well? They’re called FortiGate Virtual Appliances, or FortiGate VM.
Virtual firewalls are commonly used to protect virtualized environments in software-defined data centers and multi-cloud environments. FortiGate VM secures applications and workloads in public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and so on. It also safeguards your private cloud infrastructure using application-centric security policies to protect the private cloud. Think VMware, Nutanix, and Openstack.
Why hardware AND virtual appliances?
FortiGate Virtual Firewall watches over all your assets and workloads across your multi-cloud environment. What does that mean? With FortiGate VM, you can secure and prevent threats across Hypervisors like VMware ESX/NSX-T, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Microsoft AzureStack, Citrix Xen XenServer, Cisco Cloud Services Platform 2100, and more.
It can also safefguard Public Clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, VMware, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, etc all from one platform.
The combination of physical and virtualized firewalls offers on one hand, unmatched performance and security capabilities. On the other hand, it allows for the growth and evolution of the consolidating datacenter with no service degradation or bottlenecks. And no compromise on security.
Advantages
Few organizations use 100% hardware or 100% virtual IT infrastructure these days. There’s a need for both hardware and virtual appliances in your security strategy, because they do different things. Fortinet allows you to build the security solution that is right for your environment with hardware and virtual appliances to secure everything from the core right out to the edge.
And FortiManager virtual or physical appliances allow you to easily manage and update your Fortinet security assets — hardware, virtual, or both. And you do it from a single pane of glass.
How is FortiGate VM different from the physical FortiGate firewall?
Not very. FortiGate VM is the physical FortiGate packaged as a virtual appliance. FortiGate VM delivers the same FortiOS and FortiGuard real time threat intelligence as the hardware models. It just has a virtual form factor. FortiGate VM offers flexible licensing for virtual network deployments. Just like the physical firewalls.
The FortiGate VM optons are VM00, VM01, VM02, VM04, VM08, VM16, VM32, and VMUL. UL stands for unlimited, and it refers tovCPUs supported. Talk about scalable.
Each of these models has a version that doe not support VDOMs (by default, at least). They are designated with the letter “V” at the end, i.e; “FortiGate VM02V”.
Specs
Depending on the model, you can control from 32 to 1,024 access points tunneled. They all go from 32 GB to 1 TB of storage support, and all have unlimited user licenses. FortiGate VM ranges from 10K to 200K firewall policies, depending on the model you select, and support from 2,000 to 20,000 registered endpoints. They start at 10 virtual domains and go up to 500 maximum, for the FortiGate VM-UL.
Throughput is as follows: VM00 and VM01 – 12 Gbps, VM02 – 15 Gbps, VM04 – 28 Gbps, VM08 – 33 Gbps, VM16 – 36 Gbps, VM32 – 50 Gbps, and VMUL – unmlimited vCPU cores and RAM. It is worth noting that actual performance may vary depending on the network and system configuration.
FortiGate firewalls are available in many different models to meet pretty much any need at any scale. With an expansive line, Fortinet has a FortGate that matches your use case.
And in addition, Fortinet offers many other fabric network and security services as virtual appliances. FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM, FortiWeb, FortiMail, and FortiSandbox are all available as virtual appliances.
Whether you need hardware, software, virtual, or a combination, Fortinet and Corporate Armor are a fantastic combination of power, speed, service and price that will absolutely take the pain out of IT for you. So why not email us, or call 877-449-0458? Thanks for reading!
FortiGate VM datasheet
Cool stuff about FortiGate VM
| Controls from 32 to 1,024 access points in tunneled mode |
| Delivers from 32 GB to 1 TB of storage support |
| Unlimited user licenses |
| From 12 Gbps to 50 Gbps of Throughput |