Fortigate Vm Sizing Azure

: Useful if you are running memory-intensive features like heavy logging or large-scale SSL-VPN termination . Critical Configuration Tips Instance type support | FortiGate Public Cloud 7.6.0

Before selecting an Azure VM size, you must understand the Fortinet license tiers. The software license places a "hard cap" on throughput, regardless of how powerful the underlying Azure VM is.

For more detailed performance metrics and to download the latest datasheet, you can explore the FortiGate VM on Microsoft Azure page. fortigate vm sizing azure

Fortinet supports several Azure VM types, but certain families are highly optimized for network virtual appliances (NVAs). The F-Series (Compute-Optimized) — Highly Recommended

Edge firewalls, high-volume VPN hubs, and full NGFW inspection. The D-Series (General Purpose) : Useful if you are running memory-intensive features

Rather than deploying a massive 32-core FortiGate VM to handle all cloud traffic, scale horizontally. Use a utilizing Azure Virtual WAN or a centralized transit VNet. If throughput demands grow, scale out by adding more FortiGate instances behind an Azure Load Balancer rather than scaling up to increasingly expensive VM sizes. Disk Performance

| Family | Characteristics | FortiGate Recommendation | |--------|----------------|--------------------------| | | General purpose, Intel Xeon, good balance | Best for 80% of use cases (VPN + inspection) | | Ev3 / Ev4 | Memory-optimized, same CPU as Dv3 | Required for large session tables (>2M) or many IPsec tunnels | | Fsv2 | High frequency Intel (3.4 GHz) | Ideal for SSL inspection and low-latency requirements | | Dasv4 | AMD EPYC (3.0+ GHz) | Excellent price/performance for stateful firewall only (not VPN-heavy) | | B-series (Burstable) | Use only for lab/DevTest | Production traffic will exhaust CPU credits and drop packets | For more detailed performance metrics and to download

For dynamic workloads, use Fortinet’s terraform-azurerm-fortigate-autoscale to add/remove instances based on CPU >75% for 5 minutes.

To properly size your FortiGate-VM, you need to understand the key performance numbers provided in the official FortiGate VM datasheet: