Order types

On general public clouds, there are usually two order types: bring your own license (BYOL) and on-demand.

FortiGate-VM deployable on IBM Cloud supports only BYOL.

BYOL offers perpetual (normal series and v-series) and annual subscription (s-series) licensing as opposed to on-demand, which is a term-based subscription available with marketplace-listed products. BYOL licenses are available for purchase from resellers or your distributors, and the publicly available price list, which Fortinet updates quarterly, lists prices. BYOL licensing provides the same ordering practice across all private and public clouds, no matter what the platform is. You must activate a license for the first time you access the instance from the GUI or CLI before you can start using various features.

In both BYOL and on-demand, cloud vendors charge separately for resource consumption on computing instances, storage, and so on, without use of software running on top of it (in this case the FortiGate-VM).

For BYOL, you typically order a combination of products and services including support entitlement. S-series SKUs contain the VM base and service bundle entitlements for easier ordering.