FortiGate 60 series end of life: every variant, and why the suffix decides the date

FortiGate 60 series end of support dates

We track 21 variants in this family. 14 are already past end of support and 3 end within the next twelve months. The earliest and latest dates are 16.7 years apart, which is why a single family-wide date is worth nothing.

Sorted by end of support, soonest first. The date shown is End of Support, the last day the vendor will fix, patch or replace the unit. It is not End of Sale, which is simply the last day you could buy one.

Source: Fortinet Product Life Cycle export, End of Support Date column. A variant we have no published date for is left out of this table rather than given a guessed one.

Why the suffix matters more than the generation

Most inventories record FortiGate 60E and stop there. Fortinet does not. The lifecycle export lists the 60E, 60E-POE, 60E-USG, 60E-POE-USG, 60E-LENC, 60E-DSL and 60E-DSLJ as separate products with separate end-of-support dates, and the gap between the earliest and the latest of them is more than two years.

The suffixes are not decoration. POE is the powered-port variant. USG and LENC are the United States Government and low-encryption SKUs, sold into procurement channels that require longer or differently-dated support commitments, which is exactly why they outlive the commercial unit. DSL and DSLJ carry an integrated modem, with DSLJ being the Japanese variant.

The practical failure is always the same shape. Someone finds one date for "FortiGate 60E", applies it to forty firewalls, and half of them are wrong in one direction or the other. The table above is the only safe way to read this family: match the full part number, not the series name.

How to read the part number off the unit

Run get system status on FortiOS. The Version line names the exact model, for example FortiGate-60E-POE, and that is the string to match against the table. The label on the underside of the chassis carries the same string.

If you only have the serial number, the prefix encodes the model: FG60E for the base unit, FG6HE for the PoE variant. Serial prefixes are a reasonable fallback but the CLI answer is unambiguous, so prefer it when you can reach the device.

What replaces a 60 series firewall

Fortinet positions the FortiGate 60F and 70F as the successors in this form factor, and above them the 80F and 90G. Which one is right depends on throughput with inspection turned on rather than on the model number, because the F and G generations moved a lot of work onto the SoC4 and NP7 chips.

Two specific pages are worth reading if you are replacing an E generation unit: the FortiGate 80E end of life page and the FortiGate 100E end of life page, both of which have dates inside the next few months. For the whole vendor picture see the Fortinet EOL guide or the full Fortinet end of life list.

What the rest of the FortiGate desktop range has left

If you are replacing a 60 series unit, the question is not only when the old one dies but how much runway the new one has. These are the other two-digit FortiGate models still inside their support window.

Still-supported models only, soonest deadline first. Channel and revision suffixes are folded into their base model here and dated by the earliest of the group, so this table understates rather than overstates. The full per-variant list is on the Fortinet EOL list.

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