Fortinet has sold us the wrong product, any ideas?

[q1uant]

We are deploying 120 switches and want to use L2 FortiLink for the convenience of not having to configure all the VLANs and trunking manually, also we want to use the NAC lite on FortiGates for some basic NAC features. Now a small Fortigate cannot manage such a number of switches, thus we have been recommended the FortiSwitchManager.

Now that it's deployed, we have noticed it only does L3 Fortilink (only management, no NAC or VLANs).

Any ideas of how to manage all those 120 switches according to our needs? The only solution we found was to buy a 1000F or higher because they can manage up to 196 switches or a VM08 since it can manage up to 300 switches according to the max value table.

Thank you for any ideas

[AEK]

If you want to manage it that way then I think there is no other solution that a well sized FortiGate.

[abelio]

Hello q1uant

I' d recommend work more closely with your Fortinet partner before make purchasing decisions

Partners have direct access to Fortinet SEs, and both will advise you with the right equipment sizing for your specific scenario

[ebilcari]

This will relay heavily on the type of deployment and network requirements, but you can start exploring FortiNAC. It's a full NAC solution that can work also with switches in standalone mode and in addition to visibility and many other features, it can do VLAN assignments directly via CLI/API or using RADIUS.