FortiADC-VM Virtual appliance - license - 4 virtual CPUs
Mfg # FAD-VM04
CDW # 3259316
| UNSPSC 43222640
Know your gear
FortiADC virtual application delivery controller appliances provide all the features of a hardware-based ADC with the flexibility of being a virtual appliance. All the FortiADC virtual appliances support VMware ESXi/ESX 5.0/5.1.
Enhance your purchase
FortiADC-VM Virtual appliance - license - 4 virtual CPUs is rated
3.80 out of
5 by
6.
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Ashwani Sharma from
User-friendly interface makes it simple to use and the technical support is excellent
What is our primary use case?
We use this product for application delivery control and global load balancing.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is its simplicity.
The interface is user-friendly.
What needs improvement?
It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall.
They should update this product more often.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using FortiADC for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
FortiADC has been pretty stable and reliable for us.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have a fixed integration so scalability is not relevant for us.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is excellent and we have no issues with them. You can call them from the device itself, after which they come online and they are pretty good.
How was the initial setup?
We had some complexity when it came to the initial setup, although I think that it was because of us, rather than the product. It took us a total of five days before we went online, which included setup and testing. This involved connecting to our backend networks, creating the VLANs, and so forth.
Overall, it was not difficult and the vendor gave us great support.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated application delivery controllers and global load balancers from other vendors before choosing FortiADC.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, this is a good product, it does what it's supposed to, and I would recommend it to anybody. My main complaint is that the WAP functionality is very primitive.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2020-08-13T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Seshi Dumpa from
Excellent cloud scalability, technical support executes well, and cost factor is reasonable
What is our primary use case?
We load segregated data from the web application firewalls and have an alternative load balancer for both our internal and external applications. There are some extensive rewrites that we need. This load is used across our geographically dispersed locations, and data centers, that are actually facilitating both regions.
What is most valuable?
The ease of use is because of the functionality across these devices currently in the market. Most of the features are the same that they are offering with the certificate, be it the offloading options, load-balancing features, which is a provision, and a set of rules that you can implement. That has been kind of a common standard, of course, depending on the money and the grade of the device. Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running needs minimal knowledge is another reason.
What needs improvement?
I would say in terms of their basic selling point was always everything built into one, even if you take their Fortigate firewalls, FortiWeb Application Firewall, be it FortiADC, they do push many features into one. And even the smallest version or the model of the device still gives you extensive features, but that comes at the cost of CPU and memory, which makes it hard. Even before you start to use extensive features, you start already seeing the CPU and memory be used to capacity. So at some point, I feel like there is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle. If they can provide much more flexibility in designing it, that would be great because of the number of options it provides either fixed set as of now but given some open sources do more options, open source software, so configured on Linux and Freebase, they offer more than this.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Fortinet FortiADC for the past four years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
When it comes to stability the issues are minimal. However, whenever we faced an issue, it was a major issue. So it does work well in normal mode, but when it has a problem, then it can be a very difficult situation.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With the scalability option on the cloud, you can have that easily.
How are customer service and support?
When I have worked with technical support on many occasions they do offer proper assistance in a timely manner, but their initial processing in the Fortinet support structure is more of a challenge. Depending on the educational level of the technical support depends on the speed of how your support ticket is handled and could take longer to diagnose.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The initial plan was to have FI as a global load balancer, but given the cost factor, we switched to FortiADC.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was quite straightforward. You work with some network interfaces through configuration, plug it in, and have a default rule in place, and it still runs. It does the job on its own.
What about the implementation team?
We could manage it internally, as I mentioned, the ease of use and how easy you can deploy, it was still better, but I could not say the same for other devices. I have seen where you definitely need either an expert or vendor support to have those rules configured on other deployments. We do not have that kind of dependency with Fortinet or FortiADC products.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You definitely need a support license. If it is critical web application firewalls and they have hundreds and thousands of customers, then I would say FortiADC higher models would definitely support it well.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Fortinet FortiADC an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2022-09-22T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Saeid Khanipour Ghobani from
High-level load balancing and routing protocols but scalability is limited to 200 gigabits
What is our primary use case?
Our company uses the solution for various clients.
For one customer, we use the solution for global load balancing, GSLB, and sending DNS requests to the primary DNS.
For another customer, we use the solution as the ADC for data centers to protect all websites and use Layer 7 to provide DDos protection and load balancing for web traffic.
For a third customer, we use the solution as a GSLB but rented a data center rack to deploy as a virtual machine with all DNS requests going to the cloud and then to the customer.
How has it helped my organization?
Our company provides WAF and complicated applications to customers. If we do not use the solution, we have issues because it protects the web server from SQL injections, XSS, DDoS, and HTTP attacks. Competitors such as Palo Alto, Check Point, and even FortiGate cannot provide a WAF.
Link load balancing also helps us to reduce our linked and internal traffic.
What is most valuable?
The solution provides high-level services such as availability, redundancy, and load balancing between servers.
Routing protocols are better than those in FortiWeb.
For example, CNN has one website but a lot of web traffic so we need more than one server for high availability and load sharing. The solution allows for load sharing across multiple servers or even multiple data centers where they run as active/active or active/passive. If we lose the primary data center due to natural disaster or a high global load, we can manipulate DNS traffic to the secondary data center.
What needs improvement?
The solution's WAF needs an upgrade because it is not as good as FortiWeb, VMware, F5, or Imperva.
The solution should be migrated to a software-defined network like Imperva and VMware.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable. We use version 6.2.4 to provide better stability than the newer versions which have more bugs.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is limited to 200 gigabit throughput on the best version of the solution which is the 5000F series.
We can use the solution as an HA in active/active mode which allows us to increase throughput by 50%.
For one customer, we used the 1200F series with a 40 gigabit throughput and usage was less than 70% with one million users.
How are customer service and support?
I have not used technical support for the solution but have used it for other Fortinet products.
Colleagues work for the company so I can get quick solutions for issues.
For one particular issue, technical support was not able to resolve our issue so they sent us a new version of the solution and that solved the problem.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup and configuration are very easy because the solution includes a simple OS. Initial configuration takes about ten minutes for simple environments.
It is important to assess the environment and decide what services, servers, and web applications are needed.
The solution can be configured in router mode or one-arm mode which uses source NAT as destination NAT to send traffic to the firewall. One-arm mode is more complex and requires discussions with our engineers.
For example, you have a website with Node.js for your programming language, Amazon S3 for your CDN, NGINX for your web server, and you use both React and reCAPTCHA. Our team meets with your developer to learn your website and OS through a multi-step process and then we configure the solution to protect everything.
What about the implementation team?
Depending on the complexity of the project, we implement the solution ourselves or sometimes we rely on third-party teams to assist us.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is less expensive than F5 or Imperva and is the most reasonably priced option available.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We use different solutions based on a customer's needs and budget.
Imperva is the best solution, F5 is the best for on-premises, and we also like Magic Quadrant.
VMware has all the features of FortiADC such as GSLB, load balancer, and WAF. It can be used for your data center or as a software-defined network with a single point of management that does not have 200 gigabit limitations.
What other advice do I have?
It is important to know your network and load share needs before deciding on a solution. This assessment will help you decide if a certain model of the solution will meet your needs or if you should look at another product such as F5, Imperva, or VMware.
I currently use version 6.2.4 of the solution because we will not update to 7.0 or 7.1 until they are in the market for a year and all bugs have been worked out.
Fortinet equipment can have bugs and some exist in the version we use but the there are more bugs in the newer versions.
I rate the solution a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-09-26T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1502592 from
Simple to use and easy to integrate; we had issues with SSL and encrypted traffic
What is most valuable?
I like all the products in the Fortinet family, they are simple to use and you can integrate a virtual server in a couple of minutes. If you have the topology, if you have the network, you can make a virtual server batch in a couple of minutes. It uses the same FortiOS regardless of the product.
What needs improvement?
The product needs more development because it has issues with SSL traffic and encrypted traffic. It's been a little while since I used it and maybe things have improved but with Fortinet you can use a lot of features near the load balancing mechanism.
Fortinet decided to cut the product into two pieces, because FortiWeb has a lot of security features, but FortiADC has a load balancing mechanism. Customers need a fast solution with a load balancing solution and a web application firewall. If you are using FortiWeb, you can use FortiGuard Intelligence Service. But in the FortiADC, it has more load balancing features, but it lacks security features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used this solution for one year.
What other advice do I have?
In comparison to its competitors, I rate this solution a five out of 10.
Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2021-02-19T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Omar Cancino from
Easy to manage, stable, easy to configure, and has good support
What is our primary use case?
I am an IT integrator and we sell ADC, mainly Fortinet FortiADC.
In our last project, we used Fortinet FortiADC for load balancing some specific applications for telecom.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading capacity.
It is easy to manage and easy to configure.
What needs improvement?
The initial setup could be simplified.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
They have different appliances to cover low performance, less performance, and big-box data that supports large capacities.
With our customers, we have 200,000 end-users.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support for me is okay and I don't have any problems with them. I have no complaints.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was not complex, but it was not simple either.
These types of machines have complexity, but with a good engineering team, it is much easier to do the jobs.
We have a team of two to deploy and maintain this solution.
The design, installation, and configuration took one week.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Fortinet FortiADC a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-03-21T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
NajdatTurani from
Good SSL offloading and performance, plus it catches security breaches in our academic environment
What is our primary use case?
We are an academic institution and our primary use of FortiADC is for student registrations. In the month that I have been using this solution, it seems to be working fine. It is a trial version and I am using it as a virtual appliance, rather than a physical one.
How has it helped my organization?
Our students can use this solution to view communication that has been published, including for courses. It can be viewed using computers connected to the internet, phones, and other mobile devices.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading. TSL and SSL offloading are both very good features.
This solution improves security for servers by offering data loss protection.
What needs improvement?
FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved. The commands that you need to use are complex.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been evaluating FortiADC for about one month.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The platform is very easy to scale because it's virtual. You just buy licenses and increase the hardware when needed. We have as many as 3,000 users, although not all of the time. We probably have about 1,000 concurrent users. All of them are students.
How are customer service and technical support?
The FortiADC technical support has responded to my questions and resolved issues.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used Brocade, which is now obsolete and the company did not release a similar product. Brocade was a good product with good performance, but I need new firmware and I can't upgrade it. It is restricted to TLS version 1.0 only, whereas I need to use TLS 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3. TLS 1.0 has weak encryption.
The initial setup of Brocade was complex and the company could not make the configuration easier. You needed experience because it is mostly operated through the command-line interface. It is similar to a Cisco product in this way. I was able to complete the setup on my own by reading the documentation that was available on the internet.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I am currently evaluating FortiADC and Kemp.
The Kemp solution lacks information and the graphical interface is not very good. Also, Kemp has given us no support.
I was interested in evaluating a solution by Barracuda but I could not get a trial version.
What other advice do I have?
The suitability of this solution depends on the users and the company. Load balancing is very important for big companies. They need to use it for TSL and SSL offloading.
I am not interested in additional features. I only want FortiADC to work fine as it catches security breaches and increases performance.
Overall, FortiADC is a good product, although it is complex to configure.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2020-01-11T00:00:00-05:00