If you’re like me you would rather be running your Virtual Machines using an open source Hypervisor, my favourite is Proxmox. The Fortigate VM (KVM Version) runs very well in Proxmox which I prefer running over VMware Esx.

This guide assumes you already have your Proxmox server up and running are comfortable using Linux terminal.

First you’ll need to download the Fortigate VM KVM image from the Foritnet support site, the VM image will be called fortios.qcow2. VM images in Proxmox by default are stored under /var/lib/vz/images/<vmid>, the <vmid> directory needs to be created, in this case I picked 120:

#mkdir /var/lib/vz/images/120

next copy the VM image to the new directory in Proxmox, I use scp:

#scp fortios.qcow2 root@10.10.181.2:/var/lib/vz/images/120/

Next we need to create the <vmid>.conf file under /etc/pve/qemu-server/<vmid>.conf, in my case 120.conf

/etc/pve/qemu-server/120.conf:

args: -uuid 12345678-abcd-bbbb-cccc-225535555413
bootdisk: virtio0
cores: 2
memory: 1024
name: Fortigate-VM
net0: virtio=52:54:00:0D:D9:1D,bridge=vmbr0
net1: virtio=52:54:00:CC:15:6D,bridge=vmbr1
net2: virtio=52:54:00:4E:F4:B8,bridge=vmbr1
net3: virtio=52:54:00:90:A4:5D,bridge=vmbr1
net4: virtio=52:54:00:90:A4:5A,bridge=vmbr1
net5: virtio=52:54:00:90:A4:5B,bridge=vmbr1
ostype: l24
serial0: /dev/ttyS0
sockets: 1
vga: std
virtio0: local:120/fortios.qcow2

The Fortigate VM is now ready to boot in Proxmox