Connect To Both Fortigates In An HA Cluster Separately

By Manny Fernandez

May 6, 2020

Connect to both Fortigates in an HA Cluster Separately

When you configure a FortiGate in HA, normally, there is no way connect to the second box unless you ssh to the master and then connect via it to the secondary.  The only way to connect to the secondary box was using the following command:

execute ha manage 0 %admin-account%

There is another option named Reserved Management Interface .  Using this option, you can connect to each of the devices independently.  The use case for this would be to poll SNMP on each of the devices.

In my example, I am using a 400E.  The 400E has a single HA interface so I am going to use port16 as the secondary HA and port15 as the management interface.

On the Master Firewall

Interface Configuration

You will need to configure the port with the correct IP address it will use for the management

config system interface edit "port15" set vdom "root" set ip 10.10.10.140 255.255.255.0 set allowaccess ping https ssh http fgfm set type physical set dedicated-to management set role lan set snmp-index 2 next end

In the above snippet, we are configuring this firewall with the .140 IP address.  The secondary will be .141.

HA Configuration 

Now we need to configure the HA portion on the master firewall.

config system ha set group-name "HA-GROUP" set mode a-p set password ENC <removed> set hbdev "ha" 50 "port16" 100 set override disable set monitor "port3" "port1" (Represent inside and outside) set session-pickup enable set priority 180 config ha-mgmt-interfaces edit 1 set interface "port15" set gateway 10.10.10.1 next end end

I always set the master by using a priority of 180 since the default is 120

Routing Table 

We can see that this ha configuration has the gateway of 10.10.10.1 under the ha-mgmt-interfaces section.  This acts as a VRF of sorts.  This is a separate routing instance for the new management interfaces.

On the Secondary Firewall

Interface Configuration

On the secondary FortiGate, you can drop this configlette into the CLI.  This will configure the management interface for the secondary FortiGate.  This interface will NOT sync with the master.

config system interface edit "port15" set vdom "root" set ip 10.10.10.141 255.255.255.0 set allowaccess ping https ssh http fgfm set type physical set dedicated-to management set role lan set snmp-index 2 next end

HA Configuration

Next we will configure the HA portion on the secondary FortiGate.

config system ha set group-name "HA-GROUP" set mode a-p set password ENC <removed> set hbdev "ha" 50 "port16" 100 set override disable set monitor "port3" "port1" (Represent inside and outside) set session-pickup enable set priority 120 config ha-mgmt-interfaces edit 1 set interface "port15" set gateway 10.10.10.1 next end end

GUI

In the GUI, you can also configure this interface.  Since I normally use the CLI to do the HA configuration, I do not use the GUI as much but it IS available.

Simply enable the Management Interface Reservation but clicking the button and making sure it goes green.

Choose the interface and then enter the Gateway

You will need to manually configure each Management Interface IP address separately either through the GUI or the CLI.