High Availability Hyper-V configuration

Promiscuous mode and support for MAC address spoofing is required for FortiGate-VM for Hyper-V to support FortiGate Clustering Protocol (FGCP) high availability (HA). By default the FortiGate-VM for Hyper-V has promiscuous mode enabled in the XML configuration file in the FortiGate-VM Hyper-V image. If you have problems with HA mode, confirm that this is still enabled.

In addition, because the FGCP applies virtual MAC addresses to FortiGate data interfaces and because these virtual MAC addresses mean that matching interfaces of different FortiGate-VM instances will have the same virtual MAC addresses you have to configure Hyper-V to allow MAC spoofing. But you should only enable MAC spoofing for FortiGate-VM data interfaces. You should not enable MAC spoofing for FortiGate HA heartbeat interfaces.

With promiscuous mode enabled and the correct MAC spoofing settings you should be able to configure HA between two or more FortiGate-VM for Hyper-V instances.

Start the FortiGate VM

You can now proceed to power on your FortiGate VM. Select the name of the FortiGate VM in the list of virtual machines, right-click, and select Start in the menu. Optionally, you can select the name of the FortiGate VM in the list of virtual machines and select Start in the Actions menu.

Create the                       virtual machine                                                                       Deployment example – KVM