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)

Full mesh high availability


Earlier in the chapter we talked about the link aggregation and 802.3ad protocol. As we said, the mentioned solutions expand redundancy and high availability also to the hardware devices connecting the FortiGate units to the rest of the network (usually network switches). The required configuration is called Full Mesh HA. The FortiGate cluster will be connected to the network using redundant connections and switches. In the following diagram, we can see a cluster made up of two units (FortiGateA and FortiGateB) connected with a full mesh to the internal network:

All the connections are redundant, including two interfaces dedicated to the cluster heartbeat. We will use two switches to have the highest level of continuity. Cluster configuration will follow the same steps we have seen when we were talking about FGCP (or FGSP), while the redundant links will be configured using the steps explained earlier in the chapter for the link aggregation.