Operating and managing the cluster

You can now manage the workers in the same way as you would manage a standalone FortiGate. You can connect to the worker GUI or CLI using the External Management IP. If you had configured the worker mgmt1 or mgmt2 interfaces you can also connect to one of these addresses to manage the cluster.

To operate the cluster, connect networks to the FortiController front panel interfaces and connect to a worker GUI or CLI to configure the workers to process the traffic they receive. When you connect to the External Management IP, you connect to the primary worker. When you make configuration changes they are synchronized to all workers in the cluster.

You can use the external management IP followed by a special port number to manage individual devices in the cluster. For details, see Managing the devices in an SLBC cluster with the External Management IP.

To manage a FortiController using SNMP you need to load the FORTINET-CORE-MIB.mib file into your SNMP manager. You can get this MIB file from the Fortinet support site, in the same location as the current FortiController firmware (select the FortiSwitchATCA product).

By default on the workers, all FortiController front panel interfaces are in the root VDOM. You can configure the root VDOM or create additional VDOMs and move interfaces into them.

For example, you could connect the internet to FortiController front panel interface 1 (fctrl/f1 on the worker GUI and CLI) and an internal network to FortiController front panel interface 6 (fctrl/f6 on the worker GUI and CLI) . Then enter the root VDOM and add a policy to allow users on the internal network to access the internet.