NIC/Port behaviour with Fortigate-VMXX

[MartinSperrin]

Hi,

I've come across an issue with a Fortigate-VM04 that I'm trying to provision in a public cloud environment which is running on VMWare ESXi. The environment has the following limitations due to the way the environment/orchestration is setup:

[ul]

Can only assign 7 NIC's to a VM (instead of usual 10).

Cannot change the network a NIC is connected to, have to delete the NIC and add a new one.[/ul]

The problem I'm seeing is how the VM NIC's get mapped to the Fortigate ports. In our own VM Environment if I import the .ovf and leave the 10 NIC's assigned they map NIC 1 maps to port 1, NIC 2 maps to port 2 etc. all the way up to NIC 10 mapping to port 10. If however I  remove 3 of those NIC's the NIC/Port mapping will change as follows - 1/1 2/6 3/4 4/DOWN 5/5 6/3 7/DOWN 8/DOWN 9/2 10/7. As you can see this is really confusing as the NIC/Port swapping around means that the IP address and any polices mapped to the port now need to change to match the new port mappings.

The NIC's can also flip around simply if you delete one and add another. I removed a NIC and added another to connect to a different network and when I did this 4 of the 7 NIC's flipped to different ports.

In PFSense there is a ability to statically set MAC addresses to interfaces so that they never move - is there a similar ability in FortiOS or is it at least possible to understand how it determines which NIC/Mac is assigned to which port?

Thanks,

Martin