Chapter 10 Install and System Administration for FortiOS 5.0 : Interfaces : Physical
  
Physical
FortiGate units have a number of physical ports where you connect ethernet or optical cables. Depending on the model, they can have anywhere from four to 40 physical ports. Some units have a grouping of ports labelled as internal, providing a built-in switch functionality.
In FortiOS, the port names, as labeled on the FortiGate unit, appear in the web-based manager in the Unit Operation widget, found on the Dashboard. They also appear when you are configuring the interfaces, by going to System > Network > Interface. As shown below, the FortiGate‑100D (Generation 2) has 22 interfaces.
 
Two of the physical ports on the FortiGate-100D (Generation 2) are SFP ports. These ports share the numbers 15 and 16 with RJ-45 ports. Because of this, when SFP port 15 is used, RJ-45 port 15 cannot be used, and vice versa.
These ports also share the same MAC address.
Figure 235: FortiGate-100D physical interfaces
Figure 236: FortiGate-100D interfaces on the Dashboard
Figure 237: Configuring the FortiGate-100D ports
Normally the internal interface is configured as a single interface shared by all physical interface connections - a switch. The switch mode feature has two states - switch mode and interface mode. Switch mode is the default mode with only one interface and one address for the entire internal switch. Interface mode enables you to configure each of the internal switch physical interface connections separately. This enables you to assign different subnets and netmasks to each of the internal physical interface connections.
The larger FortiGate units can also include Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMC), which can provide additional interfaces (Ethernet or optical), with throughput enhancements for more efficient handling of specialized traffic. These interfaces appear in FortiOS as port amc/sw1, amc/sw2 and so on. In the following illustration, the FortiGate‑3810A has three AMC cards installed: two single-width (amc/sw1, amc/sw2) and one double-width (amc/dw).
Figure 238: FortiGate-3810A AMC card port naming
See Also
Interfaces
Interface settings
Interface configuration and settings
Administrative access
Wireless
Virtual domains
Software switch
Virtual Switch
Loopback interfaces
Redundant interfaces
One-armed sniffer
Aggregate Interfaces
Zones