Fortinet FortiADC Reviews

We use Fortinet FortiADC for disaster recovery, server load balancing, and global level server load balancing.

The GSLB is on the internet.

I can do GSLB, global server load balancing, and disaster recovery for server load balancing with web features. We can use the FortiADC as a caching server for user experience, as well as a variety of other things. It is similar to half of the web. it is 80 percent of the web.

The GSLB, the DR side, is the best part. Because we had our main side in one city, we created another, and we had a complete MPLS over the internet. We used the GSLB and data loss for our business applications.

I recently switched from an open-source version to FortiADC. For that, I believe I need to see other vendors such as the F5, as well as the A10 or something before I can say what can be improved.

Because it is so generic, the documentation requires special attention. A person who has not worked on Fortinet FortiADC or a similar product will struggle to understand what the document is trying to say.

The documentation could be more specific, and more detailed.

More step-by-step instructions for a new user, such as someone who has never used Fortinet FortiADC product from Fortinet or anyone else. Because I had previously used an open-source agent, I figured it out, but someone who hasn't would have some difficulties.

Basically, it could be more specific for those who are unfamiliar with the product, so that anyone could begin working with it.

We switched to Fortinet FortiADC five to six months ago.

Fortinet FortiADC is a stable product. The stability of Fortinet FortiADC is good.

In our company, we have three to four people who are working with Fortinet FortiADC excluding myself.

Increasing our usage is dependent on the size of our current IT infrastructure.

If we want to scale it up, we'll need more FortiADCs.

Fortinet FortiADC is easy to scale.

I have contacted technical support. Technical support is good. I would rate it a four and a half out of five.

Our only concern is with the licensing. They will support you if you purchased the licenses. If you haven't, then good luck.

Positive

We were previously using an open-source server load balancing engine, but we switched to FortiADC because of the web filtering, web features, and application delivery, such as pay caching.

I previously used Engine X as a load balancer. You cannot compare an open-source product to a commercial product.

FortiADC now includes web and other features. If I'm talking about load balancing, Engine X will do the same thing that FortiADC does, but the issue is scalability. FortiADC is more scalable than Engine X and similar technologies.

Because, I had already used multiple products, including ADC, load balancers, and the Forti web, I didn't have any difficulty. 

I had assigned one of my proteges to do it, and he was feeling a lot of pressure because he didn't understand the documentation.

If the documentation is good, installation should be simple because you can do it if you understand the document.

I would rate the initial setup a four out of five. I am reducing one because of the documentation.

This solution requires maintenance because it has web features enabled and for the web, the vulnerability features are required. If I want to stop the zero-days, I need to update directly. I'm fairly certain. Because we aren't using it for that purpose, I'm not certain, but I'm 80 to 90 percent certain it requires those kinds of updates, the security update.

We completed the deployment ourselves. We did not use a third-party vendor team.

For me, it was a very simple procedure. Talking about the entire solution takes days. However, if I'm talking about simple FortiADC local server load balancers, it took me about a day.

Pricing is determined by the size of your organization, as it involves open-source if you have a small company, open-source can help small businesses and IT departments. Why do you need to purchase FortiADC? 

However, if you're talking about large corporations that require this level of scalability and security, you will have to pay for it. What options do you have?

The price varies depending on whether you are dealing with a local team or a presale team, and some offer discounts.

They offer a perpetual license.

I would rate the pricing a four out of five.

For the time being, I believe it is a complete product. Maybe not, but it all depends on the use cases, for the time being, I don't believe that it requires any additional features for it. If I have a new requirement and this product does not meet it, I would suggest that something needed to be included or added.

I would recommend it because you don't need to buy a heavy product if you only have a few application tools. However, if you are serving more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, you will need to purchase FortiADC, a proper load balancer. It could be from Fortinet, F5, A10, or any other vendor.

We are a professional services team. We provide professional services to Fortinet and other vendors.

Our company is a partner of Fortinet.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC a nine out of ten.

We load segregated data from the web application firewalls and have an alternative load balancer for both our internal and external applications. There are some extensive rewrites that we need. This load is used across our geographically dispersed locations, and data centers, that are actually facilitating both regions.

The ease of use is because of the functionality across these devices currently in the market. Most of the features are the same that they are offering with the certificate, be it the offloading options, load-balancing features, which is a provision, and a set of rules that you can implement. That has been kind of a common standard, of course, depending on the money and the grade of the device. Ease of use in deploying and having it up and running needs minimal knowledge is another reason. 

I would say in terms of their basic selling point was always everything built into one, even if you take their Fortigate firewalls, FortiWeb Application Firewall, be it FortiADC, they do push many features into one. And even the smallest version or the model of the device still gives you extensive features, but that comes at the cost of CPU and memory, which makes it hard. Even before you start to use extensive features, you start already seeing the CPU and memory be used to capacity. So at some point, I feel like there is a mismatch between the number of features they are offering and the device capacity on how much it can handle. If they can provide much more flexibility in designing it, that would be great because of the number of options it provides either fixed set as of now but given some open sources do more options, open source software, so configured on Linux and Freebase, they offer more than this. 

I have been working with Fortinet FortiADC for the past four years now.

When it comes to stability the issues are minimal. However, whenever we faced an issue, it was a major issue. So it does work well in normal mode, but when it has a problem, then it can be a very difficult situation.

With the scalability option on the cloud, you can have that easily. 

When I have worked with technical support on many occasions they do offer proper assistance in a timely manner, but their initial processing in the Fortinet support structure is more of a challenge. Depending on the educational level of the technical support depends on the speed of how your support ticket is handled and could take longer to diagnose.

Neutral

The initial plan was to have FI as a global load balancer, but given the cost factor, we switched to FortiADC.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. You work with some network interfaces through configuration, plug it in, and have a default rule in place, and it still runs. It does the job on its own.

We could manage it internally, as I mentioned, the ease of use and how easy you can deploy, it was still better, but I could not say the same for other devices. I have seen where you definitely need either an expert or vendor support to have those rules configured on other deployments. We do not have that kind of dependency with Fortinet or FortiADC products.

You definitely need a support license. If it is critical web application firewalls and they have hundreds and thousands of customers, then I would say FortiADC higher models would definitely support it well.

I would rate Fortinet FortiADC an eight out of ten.

Our customers use Fortinet FortiADC for load balancing multiple applications on databases, web servers, etc.

Fortinet FortiADC is the most affordable appliance you can purchase from any vendor. From a technical perspective, it is the most scalable device from Fortinet.

The product's stability for VMs could be better.

We have been using Fortinet FortiADC for two years.

The product is stable in terms of hardware.

The product has good scalability.

I have logged many technical cases with the product's support team. They provide me with professional service. 

Fortinet FortiADC's initial setup is easy. The deployment process involves gathering customer information about routing and network design. The time taken for the implementation depends on the number of virtual servers or applications. In many cases, it takes three days to complete the setup. It is easy to maintain due to the powerful view of logs.

The product has affordable pricing.

F5 Advanced WAF is more stable and granular and has the latest updates compared to Fortinet FortiADC. Although both the hardware has Layer 7 load balancing method.

If you are running a small or medium-sized enterprise, I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. I rate it a five out of ten.

It's used for load-balancing traffic and DNS traffic as well. We use FortiADC as the global traffic manager and DNS solution and also as a classic load application delivery controller.

We use it to load balance between applications.

It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5.

Fortinet has some drawbacks, and it can be a bit challenging to scale. Maybe some new features could be added to address these issues.

Another area of improvement is support. So the only problems are with support, and scaling can be a bit difficult. I

It's been five years now. Currently, it's version 6.4.

It is a stable solution.  We haven't faced any problems with stability, so let's say it's an eight out of ten.

It's scalable. We can add more ADCs to the cluster if needed.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Because if we miss the appliance's sizing in the beginning, it will be hard to scale.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses. We didn't deploy the big appliances.

The support is bad. Unfortunately, they are very late in responding to our requests. It takes too much time.

Negative

The initial setup is easy to install. The process is straightforward.

The deployment takes around two to three days, considering the installation and configuration of some applications. We can easily configure the profiles.

Usually, two people from my team, two engineers, work on the product. Moreover, customers usually request maintenance. So, one person is involved in the maintenance process.

I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs. You just pay for the license and, if applicable, for the hardware appliance. If it's a VM, there is no additional cost for the license.

It's up to the customer to choose a licensing model. If you choose to buy yearly, it's usually on a yearly basis.

You can go ahead and buy this product. It's very good, pretty stable, and the price is fair, as I mentioned. So, in terms of competition, it's a good product.

Overall, I would rate it as an eight.

We mainly use FortiADC for load balancing the application traffic for our customers. The aim is for the traffic to be equally balanced between servers, whether there are two, 10 or 20 servers. There are different load balancing algorithms that we have on the FortiADC and based on that we configure and we load balance the traffic. We have a static website, so we can use FortiWeb instead of the connection coming from the client each time. FortiADC gets the request from the cache Instead of it being sent to the server. If we have different ISP links, then we do our link load balancing using FortiADC. I'm a senior cyber security engineer and we are distributors of FortiADC.

There are a lot of benefits to the customer using this solution. Because FortiADC helps in load balancing traffic, at peak times the logs get sent to FortiAnalyzer where they have an automated SOAR, security orchestration and automation for the incident response. Whenever it detects an attack, it will automatically trigger an alert on the service ticket and send it to the appropriate team. That's the benefit of this solution to the company. 

The most valuable features would be content caching and content compression. It also has an inbuilt firewall. I doubt whether any other ADC supports this firewall feature. It also has a web application firewall feature.

Any issues with this solution seem to be connected to technical support. They need to respond more quickly, providing a one or two day response time is not adequate. In addition, the company hasn't provided good technical documentation. It requires step by step procedures on how to configure some of the features on the FortiADC. They should come up with good KB articles and information related to the workings of the product. Fortinet specifies that the solution can be used for 1,000 clients, but actually we've found that you can't go above 400 for content compression and rewriting. If you go above 400, the solution becomes unresponsive. 

I've been using this solution for about five years. 

It's a reliable solution but I think F5 is better as a load balancer. We sometimes get bugs but Fortinet has a specialized bug team that can create a patch within a specified period of time, two weeks or maybe within a month and the issue will be rectified. The solution needs maintenance each time they release a new firmware. The stability needs to be tested and we need to check whatever we are running, and make sure there are no critical bugs.

The solution is scalable up to a point. If you're expanding your company and have a lot of customers, say 2,000, you need to go for a higher end model. Otherwise you'll have problems if you're using the hardware model. With the cloud and with the VM, you can always scale to your requirements. We have 400 users. We implement the solution and if customers want to use our website and database servers, the client traffic will hit the ADC and it will load balance to all the servers. If the company decides to expand, then we might need to scale FortiADC. 

Technical support has a policy that only a priority one ticket will be given priority. Without that, there can be a significant delay in getting a response from technical support. It's not good enough. 

I've had minimal experience with F5 which has more features and I think most people would go for F5. In cases where customers are using other Fortinet products they will prefer to go with FortiADC because of the SOAR feature on the FortiAnalyzer and automatic incident response on other things. 

The initial setup is straightforward. You bring up FortiADC and you configure the interfaces, then you configure the load balancing profiles. That's it. I carry out the deployment myself and it generally takes a week or two. Deployment time is based on the customer configuration, load balancing profiles, but it generally takes a maximum of two weeks. 

The deployment plan is to get the topology of the customer. Once that is complete, we create this HLD and LLD and also the solution diagram. Those are the main things that we do before deployment. Once we have the HLD, LLD reports, then we implement within the customer environment and we test if everything works, and if everything is good it gets put into production. 

The main reason a client wants this load balancer is because there is a load on the web server and one of them becomes unresponsible and that means a big loss for the company. It's the main reason they purchase FortiADC. Once they implement this solution there are no issues with the load server. 

From a pricing perspective, I believe FortiADC is cheaper than the F5 and also cheaper than some of the well established load balancers. There is a subscription fee but I'm not sure of the exact cost.

I would recommend using FortiADC, they seem to be coming up with some new features. They have a lot of patents compared to other security companies. They're coming up with new machine learnings and other features. The solution provides an overall good experience. 

I would currently rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the solution for deploying applications on local servers. Most customers use it for local traffic management and use the benefits of a security profile.

Fortinet FortiADC’s basic feature is present in all models, providing control over load balancing. Additionally, extra features found in FortiADC include bridging, which enables load balancing for CDB, UDP, and SDP.

The solution includes all the features, as well as support for global traffic management and local traffic management tools. It offers forward compatibility to integrate smoothly with Sandbox environments.

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily. It has its own antivirus.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

I have been using Fortinet FortiADC as an integrator for five years.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. Every virtual machine can expand easily. You must make size coding for three or five years for flexibility. FortiADC doesn’t have restrictions on the number of applications. It provides high availability and built-in security features like antivirus and sandbox integration.

Technical support is very good.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and depends on the number of nodes and applications. Deploying one node takes around 50 minutes.

It depends on the node and server application, source address, communication delivery control, URL, or port ID.

The product is cheap and has a yearly license.

I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

The deployment and the audio trimming may take one day.

FortiADC is stable and operates on a proprietary operating system. One advantage it has over some competitors, which run on Linux, is the strength of its operating system. This strengthens its security control. It offers a good service.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are an academic institution and our primary use of FortiADC is for student registrations. In the month that I have been using this solution, it seems to be working fine. It is a trial version and I am using it as a virtual appliance, rather than a physical one.

Our students can use this solution to view communication that has been published, including for courses. It can be viewed using computers connected to the internet, phones, and other mobile devices.

The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading. TSL and SSL offloading are both very good features.

This solution improves security for servers by offering data loss protection.

FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved. The commands that you need to use are complex.

I have been evaluating FortiADC for about one month.

The platform is very easy to scale because it's virtual. You just buy licenses and increase the hardware when needed. We have as many as 3,000 users, although not all of the time. We probably have about 1,000 concurrent users. All of them are students.

The FortiADC technical support has responded to my questions and resolved issues.

I have used Brocade, which is now obsolete and the company did not release a similar product. Brocade was a good product with good performance, but I need new firmware and I can't upgrade it. It is restricted to TLS version 1.0 only, whereas I need to use TLS 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3. TLS 1.0 has weak encryption.

The initial setup of Brocade was complex and the company could not make the configuration easier. You needed experience because it is mostly operated through the command-line interface. It is similar to a Cisco product in this way. I was able to complete the setup on my own by reading the documentation that was available on the internet.

I am currently evaluating FortiADC and Kemp.

The Kemp solution lacks information and the graphical interface is not very good. Also, Kemp has given us no support.

I was interested in evaluating a solution by Barracuda but I could not get a trial version.

The suitability of this solution depends on the users and the company. Load balancing is very important for big companies. They need to use it for TSL and SSL offloading. 

I am not interested in additional features. I only want FortiADC to work fine as it catches security breaches and increases performance.

Overall, FortiADC is a good product, although it is complex to configure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Mixed server environment with Apache Servers, IIS Servers and internal applications. Load balance all the servers through VIPs to equally distribute all the connections among the servers and SSL Offloading. We’ve used it to reduce our server farm, lowering cost, and effectively use all the servers at once.

The boxes were used to load balance the environment, making it more reliable, and improving the performance and response of the applications.

• SSL Offloading
• VM availability
• L7 load balancing

The user interface could be more friendly and CLI could be more like that of Fortigate.

No real stability issues, the system is good. Had a few problems but did a firmware upgrade and it solved them; not sure if it was a firmware problem.

Had no need to scale it up, so all good.

I didn't need to use support for this solution, but usually Fortinet support is good, not great but good.

I’m a F5 engineer as well and, to be honest, I do prefer BIG-IP, but as I’ve worked at Fortinet partners I had to deploy some of these. Before FortiADC, I deployed a FortiBalancer (the old ADC); it was a great improvement from FortiBalancer to FortiADC.

The initial setup is sort of easy but you go through a lot of screens to do it.

Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better.

I’m used to deploying F5 BIG-IP load balancer and all of its modules. Either it’s way easier or I'm more used to it.

It’s easy to use, but it could have more features, when comparing it to a F5.

Make a checklist before going into it hands-on. This will make it faster to become familiar with the application's behaviour; not all the apps can be load balanced. The best way is to implement it is to have PATs or VIPs from the firewall pointing to FortiADC virtual servers. Check into the best load balance method and, as I said, check app behaviour before choosing it. Try not to set it as round robin.