Technical Tip: Requesting a new FortiGate evaluation license after previous evaluation VM is lost

Virtual machine permanent trial licenses are available with limitations. See the article 'Permanent trial mode for FortiGate-VM'.

Only one permanent evaluation license is permitted per FortiCare account, and evaluation licenses are only valid for the virtual machine instance they were requested from. While it is possible to download the previous evaluation license file, uploading it to a new instance will not create a valid license.

This leads to an issue if the instance is lost or corrupted. If an evaluation VM already exists in the Asset Management list on the FortiCare account, a license request with the correct credentials will fail with the message 'Error downloading license: invalid serial number'.

If requesting a license through the CLI, the request fails with 'Forticare response error 61'.

FortiGate-VM64-KVM # execute vm-license-options account-id principalaccountuser@realdomain.com

FortiGate-VM64-KVM # execute vm-license-options account-password password

FortiGate-VM64-KVM # execute vm-license

This VM is using the evaluation license. This license does not expire.

Limitations of the Evaluation VM license include:

  1.Support for low encryption operation only

  2.Maximum of 1 CPU and 2GiB of memory

  3.Maximum of three interfaces, firewall policies, and routes each

  4.No FortiCare Support

This operation will reboot the system !

Do you want to continue? (y/n)y

Requesting FortiCare Trial license, proxy:(null)

Forticare response error 61.

Failed to download VM license.

If a new license must be requested because an evaluation VM is accidentally deleted or lost, it is possible to decommission the old device in FortiCloud Asset Management.

Login to support.fortinet.com and find the existing Trial VM license in Asset Management.

Decommission the previous FortiGate VM trial unit.

After the previous device is decommissioned in Asset Management, it is possible to request an Evaluation license for a new virtual machine.

See the article FortiGate VM Evaluation license update failure for other Evaluation license troubleshooting steps if errors other than 'invalid serial number' are seen.