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, the options with a high number of interfaces tend to have high numbers of vCPUs.

FortiGate – vm licensing is restrict does not restrict whether the FortiGate can work on a VM instance in a public cloud that use more vcpu than the license allow . The number of vCPUs that the license indicate does not restrict the FortiGate from work , regardless of how many vcpu the virtual instance include . However , only the licensed number of vcpu process traffic and management task . The FortiGate – VM is use does not use the rest of the vcpu .

You is provision can provision a VM instance base on the number of interface you need and license the FortiGate – VM for only the processor 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.