FortiGate 30E: Would it work for you?

I get asked all of the time how I go about sizing my hardware to meet my specific needs. A very frequent question is whether or not the FortiGate 30E is worth while. After all, it is very inexpensive and provides a gateway for a lot of folks to jump onto layer 7 hardware.

This is a brief discussion about the FortiGate / FortiWifi 30E and whether or not it would be a good solution for a small home office situation.

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[anonymousjones]

Hey Mike! I happened to work with FortiGate routers regularly and have been considering a unit for my personal use. This helped greatly! Thank you!! I liked and subscribed.

[andrewwitton]

I know that I'm late to the party on this video, but these units are great for the commercial construction environment that I work in. We deploy the 3G4G version for 1-3 people working in a site hut. IPsec tunnel back to head offlice and Citrix connections - sweet.

[MREveraert]

I've had it for my home setup for two years. It works perfectly well on 6.2.2 with IPS, AV enabled. Runs at about 72% memory utilisation consistently.

[RaviChinasamy]

Had tested and used a couple of those 30E. I even recommend my company to buy one fortiwifi equivalent for a very small remote office and its working fine for 3 PC and a couple of wireless tablets. Of course bandwidth there is not more than 30Mbps. The 3g/4g version never supported local sim card strangely. But overall, i do believe that the 30E has its use as long as the cost remain low. Great video mate! Keep them coming :)

[mxlm]

Do you have a table where I can see the number of users per type of the Fortinet? This 30E can work properly up to how many users? The processor being in high usage generates a slower connection?

[ilostmypointer]

I have to implement one at work and I have the feeling that a 7 NIC Corei7 computer I have at home would do a better job with Pfsense installed on it

[sopota]

In my case the difference was more than 200€+subs. For tiny deployments gets the job done and works well for 5 users, UTM and VPN to central office with DSL (no plans for fiber for the next decade, but 100mb seems OK for it). With the release of the F series the lower number FGs are a lot better.

[TK_Raz]

How about a 200E with all the security features turned on, including TLS inspection ... on a gigabit connection ... in a house of streamers and gamers?

[blairgetz]

40F with the new SOC4 chip is a better option. Cost difference even with support is negligible and you have 4X the appliance. When sizing an appliance give yourself some breathing room as things may change.

[AleksandrArtroom]

Hello.

The organization bought the Firtigate 30E firewall.
I began to configure it and knocked down the settings, the connection to the computer was lost.

I decided to Reset with the" Reset " button, turned off the device, pressed the button and waited for it to boot.
The device booted up and overloaded itself.
Then the Status button flashed and started to light up, but the WAN and LAN ports were not activated.

I decided to reset via the console and restore factory settings with the "execute factoryreset"command.
But still the WAN and LAN ports are no longer active.

Please tell me how you can activate them?

[ztechio]

That`s a great video since I'm searching for one to buy.
I have a question, thinking to buy it fro my small network at home which is my smart room (IOT devices) which total of 23 devices includes Xbox, hubs, devices..etc
Will it be good to have the 30E as an extra security layer or not? Also im using 5g router

[promaster]

The problem with the 30E model is the memory, if you whant to enable ips on this you need to stay below version 6.

[ArrestWire]

Hi Mike, thanks for all your videos! Really enjoying them and I find them very useful.

As for the 30E, I do have a specific use case for them: we use them for out-of-band connections to our datacenters. Every datacenter has a consumer grade internet connection tied to the WAN interface of the 30E and all out of band equipment has a default gateway pointing towards the 30E, in different segments because we have a layered datacenter network. We also terminate IPsec tunnels on them: from the office and from home (network engineers only). I think they're really suited for those tasks. Looks like they'll be stuck on FortiOS 6.2 though. Having said that, as I have a 50E for SOHO use... I think I might have to look for a new unit (60F?) here as well...

I also have a question; could you make a video about 802.1x port based authentication using a FortiSwitch 1XX managed by a FortiGate and a simple RADIUS server like you have on a Synology?

[Nettechnologist]

What are the thoughts on the F line like the 40F so small businesses

[stevevlahos]

If I would have known this i wouldn't have bought a FortiGate 30E last year. lol.

[JabbaDuhNutt]

Why do you not want to control fortiswitches on the smaller 30E?

[noelfederico]

Hi, can please someone help me to configure the SD-WAN of this stuff. I'm a newbie..

[aba-nascu]

Hi, thanks for the videos. The Intro is a little bit to loud. :-)