Creating a support account

FortiGate-VM for AWS supports on-demand and bring your own license (BYOL) licensing models. See Order types.

To make use of Fortinet technical support and ensure products function properly, you must complete certain steps to activate your entitlement. The Fortinet support team can identify your registration in the system thereafter.

First, if you do not have a Fortinet account, create one at Customer Service & Support.

BYOL

You must obtain a license to activate the FortiGate-VM. If you have not activated the license, you see the license upload screen when you log in to the FortiGate-VM and cannot proceed to configure the FortiGate-VM.

You can obtain licenses for the BYOL licensing model through any Fortinet partner. If you do not have a partner, contact awssales@fortinet.com for assistance in purchasing a license.

After you purchase a license or obtain an evaluation license (60-day term), you receive a PDF with an activation code.

To register a BYOL license:

1. Go to Customer Service & Support and create a new account or log in with an existing account.
2. Go to Register Now to start the registration process.
3. In the Registration page, enter the registration code that was emailed to you, and select Next to access the registration form.
4. If you register the S-series subscription model, the site prompts you to select one of the following:
   1. Click Register to newly register the code to acquire a new serial number with a new license file.
   2. Click Renew to renew and extend the licensed period on top of the existing serial number, so that all features on the VM node continue working uninterrupted upon license renewal.
5. At the end of the registration process, download the license (.lic) file to your computer. You upload this license later to activate the FortiGate-VM. After registering a license, Fortinet servers may take up to 30 minutes to fully recognize the new license. When you upload the license (.lic) file to activate the FortiGate-VM, if you get an error that the license is invalid, wait 30 minutes and try again.

On-demand

To create a support account for on-demand deployments:

1. Deploy and boot the FortiGate-VM on-demand Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance.
2. In the AWS management console, view the newly booted instance's instance ID. You can see the account that this instance was launched in by clicking your credentials on the top navigation bar.

   

3. Obtain the FortiGate-VM serial number:
   1. Log into the FortiGate-VM GUI management console.
   2. From the Dashboard, copy the FortiGate-VM serial number. You provide this serial number when registering your instance with Fortinet. Your instance requires Internet access for FortiCare to assign this serial number to it. Internet access is also required for the instance to report the AWS account ID that it detects to FortiCare.
4. Go to Customer Service & Support and create a new account or log in with an existing account.
5. Go to Asset Management > Register Now to start the registration process.
6. In the Registration Code field, enter the serial number, and select Next.
7. In the AWS account ID field, enter the account ID that you gathered from AWS. In this example, the AWS account ID is 980...837.

   

   If you provide an AWS account ID that does not match the one that the FortiGate reported to FortiCare during its initial bootup, FortiCare rejects it.

   

8. Complete the registration.
9. After completing registration, contact Fortinet Customer Support and provide your FortiGate instance's serial number and the email address associated with your Fortinet account.