Fortinet Lab

[askcecil]

Good afternoon.  My question is pretty simple:  I've used Fortigates (although it has been a while.)  I want to create a personal lab for practice and certification purposes.  Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get this accomplished?
I do have an Azure account. Support from the sales team at Forti has not been forthcoming.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance

[kaman]

Hi askcecil,

You can check for FortiGate VM free trial for Azure, typically 30 days, allowing you to deploy a virtual firewall on Azure VMs for testing robust security, VPNs, and integration with Azure services like SD-WAN, often using a "pay-as-you-go" (PAYG) model or Bring Your Own License (BYOL) after the trial ends, with options for full features or limited trial modes.

https://www.fortinet.com/offers/fortigate-vm-trial

Regards

[askcecil]

Thank you for your swift response.  My issue is that I can't use my work email for this.  How do I accomplish this using a personal email account?

[Yurisk]

For very basic labs - create few rules, run routing protocols like BGP/OSPF, set up IPSec VPN site-to-site tunnels with DES encryption, even integrate with free evaluaiton versions of FOrtianalyzer/Fortimanager - you can download from the support.fortinet.com the latest free evaluation FOrtigate VM and use it in virtualization environment like VMWare Workstation/Eve-ng/VirtualBox/KVM. 

TO have full funcitonality, indeed the easiest way is to sping FOrtigate in public clouds providers - I use AWS, as it has the most FOrtinet devices available - Fortigate/FAZ/FMG/FWB, which is not the case in Azure/GCP. I pay myself for this, not my work, so I created and use my own account/email, you can do the same with Azure. 

3rd option, which you mentioned does not work for you- is to get evaluation license for 60 days from Account Manager, such trial enables ALL features on Fortigate VM. 

4rd option - in NSE Insitute, which is free to use learning materials, also have paid labs for each course, which each cost 150-200$ on average, where you get predefined and fully enabled topology relevant to the lab subject, but for a limited time (few hours). 

5th option - to have read-only access w/o any effort is to access publicly available Demo devices by Fortinet, to get a feeling of the GUI, so to say. Links with creds I listed https://yurisk.info/2023/08/01/fortinet-products-fortigate-fortiweb-fortimail-and-others-online-demo...