Running FortiGate as a

Qemu VM in GNS3
Published on January 17, 2016
LikeRunn ing FortiGate as a Qemu VM in GN S3

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Andras Dosztal
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Network Domain and Solution Architect at IT Services Hungary Kft.

This is a step by step guide on adding FortiGate to GNS3 where

then you can use it as virtual network device, just like an IOS
router running on Dynamips. GNS3 1.4.0 running on Linux was
used for writing of this document.

Preparation
1. Get FortiGate VM. There's a 15 days demo available on
the Fortinet site after registration. The required file's name
will be something like this: FGT_VM64_KVM-
<version>-FORTINET.out.kvm.zip
Make sure you download the KVM version; after
extracting the archive, you should have a file named
fortios.qcow2.
2. FortiGate requires a 2nd hard disk; create an empty one by
entering this command in terminal:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 fortigate_30g.qcow2 30G
3. Upload the images to you GNS3 VM (select Qemu as file
type):
Creating the VM
1. In GNS3, go to Edit Preferences Qemu VMs, then
click on New.
2. In the appearing window, select your GNS3 VM. Click
on Next.
3. Leave the VM type on Default. Click on Next.
4. Enter a name (e.g. FortiGate 5.2.5) for your device. Click
on Next.
5. Change RAM to 1024 MB. Click on Next.
6. Select "fortios.qcow2" from the disk image list (i.e. not the
empty file you created before). Click on Finish.

Setting VM parameters
FortiGate cannot be started right after creating the VM. Select
the FortiGate VM from your Qemu VMs, then click on Edit.
Change the following parameters on each tab:

General settings
 Change category to "Security devices"

HDD

Change HDA's interface to "virtio".

Add "fortigate_30g.qcow2" to HDB's disk image. Change
the disk interface to "virtio" as well.

Network

Change the number of adapters to 10.

Change type to "Paravirtualized Network I/O (virtio-net-
pci)".
Change name format to "Port{port1}"

Screenshots

This is how it should look like:

Get your VM working
To test the VM, I created a simple topology with two Dynamips
IOS devices:

Interface settings and ping tests can be found here. Note: for
successful ping tests, you have to enable ping on port2 too ("set
allowaccess ping").