Which virus scanner?

[chouse]

Which virus scanner do enterprise VDI folks use? We are using Symantec Antivirus 10.0.1 corporate edition and are seeing massive slowdowns when all our clients update. Is anybody using virus scanning in their VDI sessions? How do you time their downloading of updates? We do not schedule scans or do any scanning during logon, or even during new updates, but a small scan takes place when the update is downloaded. Any ideas?

[sgrinker]

We use McAfee across he board here. We actually noticed a significant hit when the updates were scheduled to pull during the workday on the VM's. All of the machines CPU's would spike and slowdown performance. We've since had the admin modify the schedule to only update those machines off hours. Not sure why the update spiked the CPU so badly honestly. The same update on a normal workstation doesn't cause a disruption.

I've heard rumors that some of the different Hypervisors out there might start to have some sort of antivirus ability built in at the host level eventually. Of course I have no idea if/when that may even become a reality.

[heybuzzz]

We use McAfee 8.0 on the desktops, but use a product called PatchLink to push the DATs to them.

Looking to use an EPO server, but if it slows down the VMs while updating maybe we won't..hmmm

[williambishop]

We're using it also. A good way to go is to set up a separate norton server in vmware on one of your servers, set up at least 50% to point to it and set it for late at night. Set up another and move the time forward 6 hours or so. We actually had a network wide slowdown related to norton(symantec) but after we moved to multiple servers(well, only one more did the trick) and moved the vm's off the primary everything went back to normal.

Time for a rant. I found out months ago that if you don't put symantec on a vm, it will idle at about 16mhz or less. Put on norton, and it stays at 60 or so. I wish there was a way around it, but we need AV. Too damned bad though. Can you imagine how far you could load servers?