Draconian licensing model of Fortinet products - Fortigate, Fortimanager, Fortianalyzer in Trial

[sajiby3k]

Hi,

Today I tried to spin up some Fortigate, Fortimanager, Fortianalyzer trial VM.

I was utterly surprised looking at the licensing policy. You cannot even run the VMs without generating a so called license from support.fortinet.com.

What kind of license you get -

For fortigate - maximum 3 interface, 3 policies blah blah the list goes on.

For fortimanager, analyzer - exactly the same situation.

And only one instance for each product category is allowed per account.

I do not know how the different product managers at Fortinet is thinking !!!!!

Why Fortinet even bother to give people access to the software and give away good for nothing trial licenses !!!!!

There is no way people can learn anything in depth using those very very limited trial licenses.

Good luck to the nice fortinet's product managers. Utterly disappointed.

I will definitely look for other competitor's  product - who does not crippled their products and gives the customer the opportunity to learn full featured products for a trail number of days.

Thanks Fortinet.

[nilmoe]

Hi sajiby3k,

not all product trial licenses work the same.

E.g. FortiWeb allows 15 days fully featured use, starting with the first boot of the VM.

If you want full testing capabilities with FGT, FMG, FAZ I recommend you to reach out to your Fortinet Sales Representive and ask for EVAL/PoC licenses. They are around 60 days valid and free of charge, afaik.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Nils