FortiClient for VPN Question / Licensing

[Chuck_Whiteley_III]

I' m pretty new to the Fortinet product line and we just purchased a Fortigate 800C. I found it very easy to setup the VPN and use the FortiClient to connect. Working great! I log into the console to find out that I only have 10 licenses for the FortiClient. I' m guessing that is the default setting. I only have the VPN portion of the client turned on. When I wrote support, they said I have to buy licenses for the client. I read somewhere that you don' t have to buy licenses if you' re only using the VPN portion. I' m not sure who to believe. If I have to buy licenses, I guess I will try to setup the VPN to work with the native VPN client within Windows although it looks kind of cumbersome. Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you in advance, Chuck

[Fullmoon]

fortigate has bundle 10 free licenses for forticlient, if you go beyond 10 then you must pay it. one way for you to have unlimited vpn connections is by using ssl vpn,it is a browser based,agent less and easy to handle. :)

[emnoc]

fwiw; if all you need is the vpn portion & if you have microsoft L2TP supported clients like winows7/8 , vista or even macosx. Then L2TP/ipsec setup is not cumbersome and doe not require any 3rd party software installation. The third benefit, most Android/iOS devices has L2TP support. So you can easily build a profile that supports most BYODs & with one easy vpn configuration & you don' t have to install any additional client side software imho.

[Baptiste]

If you just want to connect a VPN , you can also use sslvpnclient (exe or msi), which is free and unlimited. You' ll find it in a sub-directory of FortiOS ( on Fortinet FTP)

[adnan_sabir]

do we also need liscense for site to site vpn...

[Carl_Wallmark]

To summarize this:

VPN on a FortiGate is free.

Both SSLVPN and IPSEC (dialup or site-to-site).

You don´t pay for the VPN part, but for webfiltering, application control, AV etc...

You can check it out here: http://www.forticlient.com

[adnan_sabir]

my license is expired so it is showing 1/10 available forticlient.. i just wanted to confirm that we don not need any license for site to site vpn on fortigate ?

[Carl_Wallmark]

no you don´t.

You can hook up FortiClient to your FortiGate and do "compliance" checks, and there you need to pay for a license if you are going above 10 clients, but it has nothing to do with the VPN part.

[Jim_FH]

I just went through this with my Fortigates.

As I understand it, the initial free 10 clients are for forticlients that you manage from the fortigate.  The clients register to the 'gate and you can set different options for them (AV, Web Filter, App Control), enforce compliance, etc.

If you don't plan on using the 'gate to manage the clients, you can connect as many clients as you want (up to the box's capacity, of course.)

So it's "free" for basic RA connectivity, licensed if you want the cool bells & whistles that come with the ability to manage the clients.

[Jan_1966]

All,

I think I found the solution for my problem. The VPN tunnel name is limeted to 15 Characters and each remote access gets a number. Since my tunnel interface is already 13 Characters adding the sequence number _0 makes it 15. So I can't go beyond Tunnel_name_9 as the _10 makes it 16 Characters.

I think I need to recreate the tunnel with a bit shorter name.

Thanks All