FortiGate-VM virtual licenses and resources

The primary requirement for provisioning a FortiGate-VM may be the number of interfaces it can accommodate rather than its processing capabilities. In some cloud environments, options with a high number of interfaces tend to have high numbers of vCPUs.

FortiGate-VM licensing does not restrict whether the FortiGate can work on a VM instance in a public cloud that uses more vCPUs than the license allows. The number of vCPUs that the license indicates does not restrict the FortiGate from working, regardless of how many vCPUs the virtual instance includes. However, only the licensed number of vCPUs process traffic and management tasks. The FortiGate-VM does not use the rest of the vCPUs.

License	1 vCPU	2 vCPU	4 vCPU	8 vCPU	16 vCPU	32 vCPU
FGT-VM08	OK	OK	OK	OK	The FortiGate-VM uses 8 vCPUs for traffic and management and does not use the rest.

You can provision a VM instance based on the number of interfaces you need and license the FortiGate-VM for only the processors you need.

Public compared to private clouds

The behavior differs between private and public clouds:

• Private clouds (VMware ESXi/KVM/Xen/Microsoft Hyper-V): both licensed vCPUs and RAM are affected. FortiOS does not have licensed RAM size restrictions. However, the minimum recommended RAM size is 2 GB for all versions.
• Public clouds (AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI/AliCloud): only licensed vCPU is affected.

For example, you can activate FG-VM02 on a FGT-VM with 4 vCPUs and there is no limit on the RAM size when running on a private VM platform.

Likewise, you can activate FG-VM02 on a FGT-VM c5.2xlarge EC2 instance with 8 vCPUs running on AWS. Only 2 vCPU is consumable, and there is no limit on the RAM size. You can refer to licenses for public clouds as bring your own license.