What VMware files should be excluded from VM's under ESX 3.5 when using Symantec Antivirue 10.x

[Gr2]

Hi there

I am new to VMware

I am trying to improve the performance of our VM's

We are using ESX 3.5 (3 hosts Servers) and all our VM's are running Win2003 Sp2

All our servers have Symantec AV corp 10.x installed on them with default Auto protect / scanning options

I got this from Symantec:

When VMWare is running it makes continuous

open, write, and close calls to the sessions hard drive files, which

causes Realtime to scan these files repeatedly. To improve scan

performance exclude VMWare files as well as the session disk files

What VMWare / Session files are they referring to? Is this the VMware hosts or Virtual machines?

The only files I find related to VMware on my VM's is:

C:\Program Files\Vmware Tools

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There are two ways to do AV within ESX.

1) From the Host, you would exclude anything residing on a VMFS

2) From within the VM, you would not use a continuous mode but a staggered scan across your VMs.... Ie. not too many VMs scanning simultaneously. Continuous scans open quite a few files, etc. But in a VM there are no 'session' files, etc. that I am aware, they all reside upon the VMFS/Datastore in question.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

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