Fortinet FortiADC Reviews

We use this product for application delivery control and global load balancing.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity.

The interface is user-friendly.

It would be good if they built in a fully functional web application firewall.

They should update this product more often.

We have been using FortiADC for three years.

FortiADC has been pretty stable and reliable for us.

We have a fixed integration so scalability is not relevant for us.

Technical support is excellent and we have no issues with them. You can call them from the device itself, after which they come online and they are pretty good.

We had some complexity when it came to the initial setup, although I think that it was because of us, rather than the product. It took us a total of five days before we went online, which included setup and testing. This involved connecting to our backend networks, creating the VLANs, and so forth.

Overall, it was not difficult and the vendor gave us great support.

We evaluated application delivery controllers and global load balancers from other vendors before choosing FortiADC.

Overall, this is a good product, it does what it's supposed to, and I would recommend it to anybody. My main complaint is that the WAP functionality is very primitive.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are an academic institution and our primary use of FortiADC is for student registrations. In the month that I have been using this solution, it seems to be working fine. It is a trial version and I am using it as a virtual appliance, rather than a physical one.

Our students can use this solution to view communication that has been published, including for courses. It can be viewed using computers connected to the internet, phones, and other mobile devices.

The most valuable feature is the SSL offloading. TSL and SSL offloading are both very good features.

This solution improves security for servers by offering data loss protection.

FortiADC is complex to configure so the interface should be improved. The commands that you need to use are complex.

I have been evaluating FortiADC for about one month.

The platform is very easy to scale because it's virtual. You just buy licenses and increase the hardware when needed. We have as many as 3,000 users, although not all of the time. We probably have about 1,000 concurrent users. All of them are students.

The FortiADC technical support has responded to my questions and resolved issues.

I have used Brocade, which is now obsolete and the company did not release a similar product. Brocade was a good product with good performance, but I need new firmware and I can't upgrade it. It is restricted to TLS version 1.0 only, whereas I need to use TLS 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3. TLS 1.0 has weak encryption.

The initial setup of Brocade was complex and the company could not make the configuration easier. You needed experience because it is mostly operated through the command-line interface. It is similar to a Cisco product in this way. I was able to complete the setup on my own by reading the documentation that was available on the internet.

I am currently evaluating FortiADC and Kemp.

The Kemp solution lacks information and the graphical interface is not very good. Also, Kemp has given us no support.

I was interested in evaluating a solution by Barracuda but I could not get a trial version.

The suitability of this solution depends on the users and the company. Load balancing is very important for big companies. They need to use it for TSL and SSL offloading. 

I am not interested in additional features. I only want FortiADC to work fine as it catches security breaches and increases performance.

Overall, FortiADC is a good product, although it is complex to configure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Mixed server environment with Apache Servers, IIS Servers and internal applications. Load balance all the servers through VIPs to equally distribute all the connections among the servers and SSL Offloading. We’ve used it to reduce our server farm, lowering cost, and effectively use all the servers at once.

The boxes were used to load balance the environment, making it more reliable, and improving the performance and response of the applications.

• SSL Offloading
• VM availability
• L7 load balancing

The user interface could be more friendly and CLI could be more like that of Fortigate.

No real stability issues, the system is good. Had a few problems but did a firmware upgrade and it solved them; not sure if it was a firmware problem.

Had no need to scale it up, so all good.

I didn't need to use support for this solution, but usually Fortinet support is good, not great but good.

I’m a F5 engineer as well and, to be honest, I do prefer BIG-IP, but as I’ve worked at Fortinet partners I had to deploy some of these. Before FortiADC, I deployed a FortiBalancer (the old ADC); it was a great improvement from FortiBalancer to FortiADC.

The initial setup is sort of easy but you go through a lot of screens to do it.

Compared to F5, FortiADC pricing is better.

I’m used to deploying F5 BIG-IP load balancer and all of its modules. Either it’s way easier or I'm more used to it.

It’s easy to use, but it could have more features, when comparing it to a F5.

Make a checklist before going into it hands-on. This will make it faster to become familiar with the application's behaviour; not all the apps can be load balanced. The best way is to implement it is to have PATs or VIPs from the firewall pointing to FortiADC virtual servers. Check into the best load balance method and, as I said, check app behaviour before choosing it. Try not to set it as round robin.

We use FortiADC as a disaster recovery solution. We deploy FortiADC as a high-availability (HA) cluster at the datacenter, and as a standalone unit at the DRC.

FortiADC helps application availability and improves user-response time. In addition, the price is competitive.

The main feature that we use is GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). GSLB makes the customer's network more reliable by scaling applications across multiple datacenters. GSLB as a disaster recovery solution can direct traffic based on site availability.

I think it would be helpful if Fortinet put more video examples on their cookbook site.

The system is quite stable so far.

The situation is a seminar session for about 250 users who need access to a BI server through their client in-house application. It's look like this:

Five Servers -> FortiADC -> FortiWLC-> Meru Wireless 

Even though FortiADC is not completely working for me, overall it helps me provide workload distribution to the servers, as expected.

Of course the troubleshooting tools. I think the troubleshooting command is easy and useful. Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is.

The L7 Persistent load-balancing algorithm has not worked for me after having tested it many times with my customer's in-house application. I'd like to suggest that the company make sure that all load-balancing algorithms work properly with most applications, even those that are in-house apps, because this is the main requirement of ADC.

After I created a virtual server, the servers are still reachable from the client side by a Ping command. That did not happen with F5. I have to work around it 
by setting up a traffic policy.

I did not test the SSL decryption feature but it's an essential point that FortiADC ensure they can support all the newest encryption methods and always be up to date.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

 I have not engaged ADC support.

I think they can make it easier. The company's homework is to redesign those menus to configure with the smallest number of steps.

If FortiADC wants to compete - and having used F5 LTM for a year - in my opinion:

1. They should make the Knowledge Base easier to access. They need a "cookbook" like Fortigate. They should modernize their web community appearance.
2. From my experience with the F5 support team, it is quite easy to access and very fast to respond. I was very impressed with them, compared to other vendors.
3. They need to provide a longer test license (30-45 makes sense, not 15 days which is what they offer currently). Have your partner manage the test
   license. With F5, for example, I can manage the license through the web with a few clicks to select product - done.
4. They should go advanced by providing a set of APIs to customize for specific requirements.