Technical Tip: Understand the fundamental difference between FortiNAC and FortiNAC-F

Description

This article describes the fundamental difference between FortiNAC and FortiNAC-F products from Fortinet and the reason for the new FortiNAC-F product.

Scope

FortiNAC.

Solution

FortiNAC running on CentOS will still be supported; however, the issue is that CentOS will not receive any future security updates (CentOS Linux - End Of Life: June 30th, 2024), leaving the Operating System part unprotected.

Check the dates in the Fortinet Product Life Cycle under Software. End of support for 9.4 is 2026-11-13, and 9.2 will receive no further engineering support from 2024-09-29.

 
It is also possible to update FortiNAC 9.x to FortiNAC-F 7.2 or 7.4 while still running CentOS, but this is not encouraged for the same security reasons. To do this, see Technical Tip: How to upgrade CentOS FortiNAC 9.x.x to FortiNAC-F.

 
New deployments should use FortiNAC-F and NAC-OS to have a secure setup in the first place, to avoid migration in the future, and to have the new features that come with the new version of the application.