About FortiGate-VM on VMware ESXi

FortiGate-VMs allow you to mitigate blind spots by implementing critical security controls within your virtual infrastructure. They also allow you to rapidly provision security infrastructure whenever and wherever it is needed. FortiGate-VMs feature all the security and networking services common to hardware-based FortiGate appliances. You can deploy a mix of FortiGate hardware and VMs, operating together and managed from a common centralized management platform.

This document describes how to deploy a FortiGate-VM in a VMware ESXi environment.

FortiGate-VM on VMware ESXi supports taking and restoring snapshots. However, taking snapshots may fail in some cases, for example, if you have added a PCI SR-IOV NIC to the FortiGate. In these cases, you may need to shut down the FortiGate-VM, take a snapshot, then start up the FortiGate-VM.