Management capacity

FortiClient EMS is intended for enterprise use and has the capacity to manage a large number of endpoints.

Having at least 200 GB of disk space available is recommended.

You can use FortiClient EMS with SQL Server Express, Enterprise, or Standard. When managing more than 5 000 endpoints, install SQL Server Enterprise or Standard instead of SQL Server Express, which the EMS installation installs by default. Otherwise, you may experience database deadlocks. See Installing FortiClient EMS to specify SQL Server Enterprise or Standard instance. The following table summarizes which SQL Server edition to use for different numbers of managed endpoints.

Number of managed endpoints	Required SQL Server edition	Other configuration notes
Up to 5000	Express. Optionally, you can use SQL Server Enterprise or Standard.	EMS and SQL Server can be installed on the same Windows Server machine, or two different Windows Server machines.
5000 to 50000	Enterprise or Standard	EMS and SQL Server can be installed on the same Windows Server machine, or two different Windows Server machines.
50000 to 250000	Enterprise or Standard	EMS and SQL Server must be installed on two different Windows Server machines.

The following provides descriptions of SQL Server editions that you can use with EMS:

SQL Server edition	Description
Express	Included with EMS installation by default. Not recommended if EMS supports more than 5 000 endpoints.
Standard	Recommended for EMS with more than 5 000 endpoints. Limited to no more than 24 CPU cores maximum resource usage. See Compute capacity limits by edition of SQL Server in the Microsoft documentation. Microsoft SQL Server can read the number of CPU cores based on the processor architecture in physical machines. In virtual machines, the compute capacity limit is determined based on the number of virtual processors, not cores.
Enterprise	Same as SQL Server Standard, but without the CPU core maximum limit.

For EMS, there is no difference between SQL Server Standard and Enterprise editions until the 24 CPU cores limit, which applies to the Standard edition, is reached.

The following topics include suggested host system hardware configurations for FortiClient EMS. The suggested configurations depend on the number of endpoints FortiClient EMS is managing, whether SQL Server and EMS are on the same or different servers, and whether there are FortiGates connected to EMS. The configurations in the following topics apply when a maximum of 20 multitenancy sites are configured. See the following for the suggested host system hardware configurations for these scenarios:

• Hardware configuration when EMS and SQL Server run on same machine with no FortiGate connected
• Hardware configuration when EMS and SQL Server run on different machines with no FortiGate connected
• Hardware configuration when FortiGates are connected to EMS

The requirements listed for managing more than 50000 to 250000 endpoints are considered best practice, even when managing a smaller number of endpoints.