Layer-3 routing in hardware

In FortiSwitchOS 3.3.0 and later, some FortiSwitch models support hardware-based layer-3 forwarding.

For FortiSwitch models that support Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) (see the FortiSwitch Feature Matrix in the Fortinet Document Library), forwarding for all ECMP routes is performed in hardware.

For switch models that support hardware-based layer-3 forwarding but do not support ECMP, only one route to each destination will be hardware-forwarded. If you configure multiple routes to the same destination, you can configure a priority value for each route. Only the route with highest priority will be forwarded by the hardware. If no priority values are assigned to the routes, the most recently configured route is forwarded by the hardware.