You can add multiple web proxy forwarding servers to a forwarding server group and then add the server group to an explicit web proxy policy instead of adding a single server. Forwarding server groups are created from the FortiGate CLI but can be added to policies from the web‑based manager (or from the CLI).

When you create a forwarding server group you can select a load balancing method to control how sessions are load balanced to the forwarding servers in the server group. Two load balancing methods are available:

When you create a forwarding server group you can also enable affinity. Enable affinity to have requests from the same client processed by the same server. This can reduce delays caused by using multiple servers for a single multi-step client operation. Affinity takes precedence over load balancing.

You can also configure the behavior of the group if all of the servers in the group are down. You can select to block traffic or you can select to have the traffic pass through the FortiGate explicit proxy directly to its destination instead of being sent to one of the forwarding servers.

Use the following command to add a forwarding server group that users weighted load balancing to load balance traffic to three forwarding servers. Server weights are configured to send most traffic to server2. The group has affinity enabled and blocks traffic if all of the forward servers are down: