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How to configure Virtual IPs on FortiGate VM Active-Passive HA Cluster to have no issues if failover happens

This article describes how to configure Virtual IPs on the FortiGate VM Active-Passive HA Cluster to have no issues if failover happens.

Scope

FortiGate-VM, AWS-FortiGate, Azure-FortiGate, GCP-FortiGate, OCI-FortiGate, or any other FortiGate-VMs hosted on Public Cloud.

Solution

There are two different ways to implement VIPs on the FortiGate-VM HA cluster:

Step 1: Create two different VIPs for each FortiGate on the Primary FortiGate, and put both of them in the Firewall policy as the destination:

On Primary FortiGate:

  • VIP1: FGT-A External IP:Port => Server IP:Port
  • VIP2: FGT-B External IP:Port => Server IP:Port

Step 2: Add the VIP in the vdom-exception to prevent the VIPs from synching between the FortiGates, and then, create the VIPs separately on each FortiGate with the same name and put it in the Firewall policy as the destination:

config system vdom-exception
edit 1
set object firewall.vip
next
end

On Primary FortiGate:

  • VIP: FGT-A External IP:Port => Server IP:Port

On Secondary FortiGate:

  • VIP: FGT-B External IP:Port => Server IP:Port