Disappointed and a bit wiser, Alex decided to take a different approach. He contacted Fortinet's customer support, explained his situation, and inquired about any possible free trials or educational resources that could help his company get started with Fortigate VM.

Let's walk through the complete process of legally deploying a FortiGate VM with the permanent trial license. This section uses VMware ESXi as the example hypervisor.

Restricted to 1 CPU core and 2 GB of RAM.

Log into the web GUI. The system will prompt you to log into your FortiCloud account to bind the permanent free trial license to your asset inventory automatically. When Do You Need a Paid License?