About FortiSandbox VM for GCP

Introduction

Fortinet’s FortiSandbox for GCP enables organizations to defend against advanced threats in the cloud. It works with network, email, endpoint, and other security measures, or as an extension of on-premises security architecture to leverage scale with complete control.

FortiSandbox is available on the GCP Marketplace.

You can install FortiSandbox on GCP as a standalone zero-day threat prevention or you can configure it to work with your existing FortiGate, FortiMail, or FortiWeb GCP instances to identify malicious and suspicious files, ransomware, and network threats.

For more information, contact Fortinet Customer Service & Support.

This document contains images from GCP interface. Some images and text may not reflect the current GCP version. Where possible, we have noted the version the image is based on. For the most accurate GCP information, please refer to the product documentation.

License Type: BYOL

FortiSandbox GCP only supports the BYOL license type. With BYOL, you purchase the firmware license from Fortinet and upload it to the unit manually.

Guest VM Running Mode (Nested and Non-Nested)

FortiSandbox supports 2 Guest VM running mode on the GCP Platform:

Nested mode

FortiSandbox runs the guest VMs inside the appliance allowing for more control for those VMs. The Nested mode supports more types of VMs, including the Default VM, Optional VM, Custom VM and Cloud VM.

Prerequisite:

The selected instance type running FortiSandbox must support virtual machine nested virtualization. Currently, GCP only supports the nested virtualization running on the Intel processor instances. For more details, please refer to the GCP Nested Virtualization documentation.

Non-Nested mode

FortiSandbox runs all guest VMs outside the appliance. The Non-Nested mode only supports Custom VM and Cloud VM. Each Custom VM clone runs as an independent GCP instance outside of FortiSandbox, and the Cloud VM runs on the Fortinet cloud platform.

Running FortiSandbox on the Non-Nested mode does not need the support of the VM nested virtualization.

Setting the Guest VM Running Mode

For fresh FortiSandbox installation, if the selected instance type supports nested virtualization, FortiSandbox will run in the Nested mode by default. Otherwise, it will run in the Non-Nested mode.

For the existing instance, upgrading the firmware will not affect or change the current operating mode.

To identify the current running mode of FortiSandbox , go to Dashboard >System Information widget after startup: Model: FortiSandbox-GCP-Nested is Nested mode and Model: FortiSandbox-GCP is Non-Nested.

After installation, you can switch the Guest VM running mode by modifying the GCP configuration. For more information, see Configure GCP Config Settings in Configure GCP Config Settings.