When will the Fortigate 200F get OS 7.0.x?

[ddaniel]

I have the Fortigate 200F and continue to wonder when it will support OS 7? This is a recently purchased firewall and I was told that it would be supporting OS7. Is that correct?

[lobstercreed]

You'd have to open a ticket with support to get this answered; internal Fortinet folks don't monitor this forum really at all.

My question would be why would you want 7.0.x code?  Testing some things out?  I'm staying away from 7.0.x for another year or more.  Latest 6.4.x is what I run on my HA 201F pair and it's buggy enough as it is.

[ddaniel]

I bought 7 firewalls at once, the 200F and the rest 60Fs.  When I set up some of the 60Fs first, I allowed them to update and they were all 7.0.  I was surprised that the 200F did not support it and want to really be sure that I did not buy an end of life product that will not be updated.  I downgraded the 60Fs so that everything is on the same level for now.

My real concern is that the 200F will be fully supported in the future.

[eti_andrei]

Many of the new F-series devices announced last year do not yet have mainline FortiOS builds. I share in your frustration. 

Consider that FortiOS 6.4 and the FG 1800F were both announced last spring, yet the 1800F could only run select 6.0 and 6.2 builds until this past July when 6.4.6 came to the 1800F - nearly a year and a half late. From what I understand, there were some issues getting 6.4 and up running on F-series devices with TPM, but this may just be a rumor (I don't believe the 1800F has a TPM, but the 200F does). 

With that said, always be mindful in the future before you look to upgrade hardware that the version of FortiOS you're running on your current hardware is supported on the hardware you plan to upgrade to. We've done a few config backports for E-series customers, while others bought their new F-series devices and shelved. Not always an ideal scenario.  

Hopefully they'll get a unified release of 7 soon. A few of our clients have it in production and it's been surprisingly stable for them considering it's so early on. We chalk this up to the focus on refinements of a select feature set in 7, as opposed to adding a ton of new features all over the place. I remain an optimist. 

[lobstercreed]

ddaniel wrote:

My real concern is that the 200F will be fully supported in the future.

The 200F is only a year and a half old, so of course it will be fully supported far into the future.  You're currently suffering from it being too NEW, not too old.

The only time a firewall doesn't ever get a new code train is when the hardware specs (chipsets, memory) get too far behind, like for example the 60D can't run anything past 6.0.x, whereas the 60E and 60F are both still capable of running all the newest code still.