HandbookD Series Models & FortiADCVM (PDF)

FortiADC is designed to provide application-aware routing, encryption, and compression. Application delivery controllers (ADC) specialize in alleviating network application performance bottlenecks and rerouting traffic during downtime or to meet distributed application designs. Without a load balancer or reverse proxy, clients attempt to connect to a server that may be busy or offline. With FortiADC, clients instead connect to FortiADC, which then makes a separate connection of its own to the back-end server, after it decides which server is optimal for quickly processing the request, and avoids servers that are busy or experiencing downtime. This document describes how to set up your FortiADC appliance. For both the hardware and virtual appliance versions of FortiADC, it describes how to complete first-time system deployment, including planning the network topology. It also describes how to use the web user interface (web UI), and contains lists of default utilized port numbers, configuration limits, and supported standards. This document assumes, if you have installed the virtual appliance version (FortiADC-VM), that you have already followed the instructions in the FortiADC-VM Install Guide. After completing setup: You will have administrative access to the web UI and/or CLI. You will have completed firmware updates, if any. The system time, DNS settings, administrator password, and network interfaces will be configured. You will have configured basic logging. You will have created at least one policy. Once that basic installation is complete, you can use the rest of this document to use the web UI to: Update the FortiADC appliance. Reconfigure features. Use advanced features, such as global server load balancing. Diagnose problems.