Book Image

Getting Started with FortiGate

Book Image

Getting Started with FortiGate

Overview of this book

FortiGate from Fortinet is a highly successful family of appliances enabled to manage routing and security on different layers, supporting dynamic protocols, IPSEC and VPN with SSL, application and user control, web contents and mail scanning, endpoint checks, and more, all in a single platform. The heart of the appliance is the FortiOS (FortiOS 5 is the latest release) which is able to unify a friendly web interface with a powerful command line to deliver high performance. FortiGate is able to give users the results they usually achieve at a fraction of the cost of what they would have to invest with other vendors.This practical, hands-on guide addresses all the tasks required to configure and manage a FortiGate unit in a logical order. The book starts with topics related to VLAN and routing (static and advanced) and then discusses in full the UTM features integrated in the appliance. The text explains SSL VPN and IPSEC VPN with all the required steps you need to deploy the aforementioned solutions. High availability and troubleshooting techniques are also explained in the last two chapters of the book.This concise, example-oriented book explores all the concepts you need to administer a FortiGate unit. You will begin by covering the basic tools required to administer a FortiGate unit, including NAT, routing, and VLANs. You will then be guided through the concepts of firewalling, UTM inside the appliance, tunnelling using SSL, and IPSEC and dial-up configurations. Next, you will get acquainted with important topics like high availability and Vdoms. Finally, you will end the book with an overview of troubleshooting tools and techniques.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 4. High Availability

The typical role of a FortiGate unit, a gateway to external networks and to the Internet, requires safeguards to prevent the following two problems:

  • Failure of a single unit that could bring an interruption of network services

  • Network traffic overloads that could create a bottleneck effect on the network traffic

Both these scenarios would have unacceptable consequences on the reliability and usability of the network. To avoid the problem related to failures, Fortinet proposes four different solutions, which are as follows:

  • FortiGate Cluster Protocol (FGCP): This solution enables us to aggregate two or more FortiGate devices into one logical unit (cluster). A cluster eliminates the single point of failure and FGCP allows us to configure the cluster units in two different structures: active-passive or active-active. Active-active configuration also relieves network traffic, balancing the load on all the available cluster units and preventing bottlenecks. FGCP is a...