The FortiGate VM is a virtual firewall appliance that can run on various hypervisors, such as ESXi,
Hyper-V, KVM, etc. The adapter type for NICs on a FortiGate VM determines the performance and
compatibility of the network interface cards with the hypervisor and the physical network. There are
different adapter types available for NICs on a FortiGate VM, such as E1000, VMXNET3, SR-IOV, etc. If
performance is the main concern and cost is not a factor, one option is to use native ESXi networking
with VMXNET3 adapter type for NICs on a FortiGate VM that will run on an ESXi hypervisor.
VMXNET3 is a paravirtualized network interface card that is optimized for performance in virtual
machines and supports features such as multiqueue support, Receive Side Scaling (RSS), Large
Receive Offload (LRO), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. Native ESXi networking
means that the FortiGate VM uses the standard virtual switch (vSwitch) or distributed virtual switch
(dvSwitch) provided by the ESXi hypervisor to connect to the physical network. This option can
provide high performance and compatibility for NICs on a FortiGate VM without requiring additional
hardware or software components. Reference:
https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.0.0/vm-installation-for-vmwareesxi/19662/installing-fortigate-vm-on-vmware-esxi
https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.0.0/vm-installation-for-vmwareesxi/19662/networking
