Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for selecting Fortinet products for your network.

The FortiADC D-series family of application delivery controllers (ADC) optimizes the availability, user experience, performance and scalability of enterprise application delivery.

An ADC is like an advanced server load balancer. An ADC routes traffic to available destination servers based on health checks and load-balancing algorithms; full-featured ADC like FortiADC also improve application performance by assuming some of the server task load. Server tasks that can be handled by the FortiADC appliance include SSL encryption/decryption, WAF protection, Gzip compression, and routing processes, such as NAT.

Features

FortiADC uses Layer 4 and Layer 7 session information to enable an ADC policy and management framework for:

• Server load balancing
• Link load balancing
• Global load balancing
• Security

The FortiADC D-series family includes physical appliances and virtual appliances.

Basic network topology

Your network routing infrastructure should ensure that all network traffic destined for the backend servers is directed to the FortiADC appliance. Usually, clients access backend servers from the Internet through a firewall such as a FortiGate, so the FortiADC appliance should be installed between your servers and the firewall.

Basic network topology shows a basic Router Mode deployment.

Scope

This document describes how to use the web user interface to:

• Get started with your deployment.
• Configure feature options.
• Configure network and system settings.
• Monitor the system.
• Troubleshoot issues.

The following topics are covered elsewhere:

• Appliance installation—Refer to the QuickStart Guide for your appliance model.
• Virtual appliance installation—Refer to the FortiADC-VM Install Guide.
• CLI commands—Refer to the FortiADC CLI Reference. In parts of this manual, brief CLI command examples or CLI syntax are shown to help you understand how the web UI configuration pages are related to the CLI commands.