Installing FortiNAC on ProxMox

As in the previous article about deploying in EVE-NG, ProxMox uses the KVM version of the FortiNAC.  This is a bit more involved that the OVA so there will be some SSH‘ng and some Linux commands.  If you are running ProxMox, this should be normal hapnistance for you.   Deploying FortiNAC on Proxmox (KVM) is a solid choice, though it’s worth noting that Fortinet doesn’t provide a native .qcow2 file out of the box. You’ll generally use the KVM/OpenStack deployment package (which comes as a .out.kvm.zip containing .qcow2 files) and adapt it for the ProxMox environment.

CPU: 4 vCPUs (minimum)
RAM: 8 GB to 16 GB (depending on the number of endpoints)
Storage: 40 GB+ (Thin provisioning is fine)
Network: At least one Bridge (vmbr0 or whatever your VLAN is) for management;

I will be using the default FortiGate Isolation/Registration VLANs and pass those through my 40GB trunk port.

Lets get started.

Downloading the File

The answer is YES, I am using some of the images from my previous article.

As we can see, I unzipped the .zip file and I now have a folder with the same name as the .zip file with some files in it.

You will want to upload these files to /tmp of the PVE node.

Once you upload the files, you will need to rename the FNCKVM.qcow2 to fortinac.qcow2 by running the following command.

mv FNCKVM.qcow2 fortinac.qcow2

Now you need to attach the qcow2 files to the VM.

qm importdisk 104 fortinac.qcow2 thin-mint
qm importdisk 104 datadrive.qcow2 thin-mint

If you forget to do the datadrive, you will get the following error when you boot up.

Error: Unable to find hard drive partition for FortiNAC persistent data. Verify hard drive status.

In the previous command, the 104 Is the VM ID (see below) and the thin-mint Is the storage name.

Now when you go to your Hardware, you will see an unused disk and if done right, you will have a second one.  If you double-click on the unused disk and click OK.

Also, I added three additional NICs.

As you can see, I have my 4 Nics and my two drives.

The default username and password is root and YAMS

Once you log in, you will see the following.

You should see a screen similar to this when you login.  You will need to have the MAC address of your VM as well as the Hardware UUID.  This will be needed when you enter your registration code on support.fortinet.com

More to come.