Fortinet NSE 6 - FortiADC

When application delivery depends on one or two people who understand FortiADC, every outage, certificate change, or new virtual server can turn into a bottleneck. This intermediate course gives security and network teams a shared, working understanding of Fortinet’s application delivery controller. It covers initial configuration, server load balancing, virtual servers, content-based routing, advanced health checks, SSL offload, firewall services, QoS, packet capture, and REST API operations.

Role fit: Built for IT Practitioners with three to five years of network security experience. Team Leads who run Fortinet environments will find it a natural extension for teams responsible for application delivery, load balancing, and security controls around FortiADC.

Time investment: About 10 hours across 10 skills of roughly an hour each. Training Managers can sequence one skill per week to reduce time away from production work.

Risk and change management: The course helps teams build practical FortiADC administration habits, including checking how traffic flows through virtual servers, using packet capture to verify behavior, and applying targeted configuration changes instead of broad rework that can break the network.

Certification: The course supports preparation for the Fortinet NSE 6 - FortiADC exam.

Use Playlists to sequence this course with related Fortinet NSE 6 training, and Team Reporting to track each learner’s progress toward exam readiness.

IT teams use this training to keep distributed applications available, secure, and fast without adding headcount or contractor spend. Instructor Keith Barker builds a FortiADC from first boot through production-style scenarios. That includes a customer troubleshooting exercise where the team learns to verify every layer of the design instead of trusting documentation that may have drifted.

• Faster outage resolution: Practitioners troubleshoot from the FortiADC outward. They confirm local connectivity and VLAN placement first, then routing, FortiGate permissions, NAT, and health checks. They also use FortiADC packet capture and CLI verification to inspect traffic behavior.
• Higher application availability: Teams build real server pools and virtual servers. They extend that work to global server load balancing, which answers DNS requests based on round trip time, location, or server health. Link load balancing across multiple internet paths adds further resilience.
• Stronger web application protection: Engineers configure FortiADC security features, including the web application firewall. These features help shield applications whose code may not follow secure handling practices.
• Better server performance and easier operations: Teams offload CPU-intensive SSL encryption and decryption from servers and use TCP multiplexing to reduce connection load. Scripting and APIs help teams automate and query multiple FortiADCs at scale.

Knowledge

• What an application delivery controller does and how FortiADC delivers availability, security, and optimization for distributed applications
• How virtual servers reference real server pools, and why even a single server must sit in a pool
• Advanced server load balancing concepts: redirects (such as HTTP to HTTPS), content rewrites, content routing, and TCP multiplexing for optimization
• How VDOMs segment one FortiADC into separately administered domains, such as a dedicated HR VDOM
• How global server load balancing answers DNS requests based on round trip time, location, and server health
• Why SSL offload moves CPU-intensive encryption and decryption off back-end servers, and how the web application firewall protects poorly written applications

Ability

• Deploy the FortiADC VM and complete initial bootstrap configuration from the CLI and the GUI
• Configure real servers, server pools, health checks, and virtual servers for Layer 7 load balancing
• Troubleshoot from the device outward: verify VLANs and local connectivity, then routing, FortiGate permissions, and NAT
• Capture packets on FortiADC interfaces for Wireshark analysis and configure link load balancing across multiple internet paths
• Configure and verify security policies, VDOM admin access, global load balancing, and SSL offload
• Use scripting for conditional if-then actions and understand how APIs let management systems query multiple FortiADCs