Using Fortigate in HA without switch

[Taieb_Riahi]

Hi,

I have a small setup that requires HA. With only 3 servers, I was thinking if to reduce cost I can go without an external switch.

Servers are used for virtualization and will have multiple VLAN configured, each VM would be assigned to a VLAN. VMs on the same VLAN on different servers would communicate without any filtering.

Link between the servers and the Firewall should be configured as a trunk.

Is this setup OK with FWs configured in HA (A/P)?

Thank you for your help!

[lobstercreed]

As someone else does the servers where I work, I had not heard of NIC Teaming, but a quick Google search seems to indicate this CAN work if configured properly.  What you would need to do is make sure your NIC team was set up with a standby adapter and not some kind of load-balancing or aggregation.  If you can make that happen, this would work for one side of your firewalls.  You'll still need a switch for the other (WAN?) side.

[ac1]

In this case only one port have the connectivity, for which in hypervisor ESXi do you configure the virtual switch NIC Teaming in mode "Route Based on Originating Port ID".