By Gary Sloane, Consultant for VMware End-User Computing
Every system, whether physical or virtual, needs antivirus and antimalware protection. But administrators and security officers, and many end users, know that virus scanning can affect performance, consuming CPU cycles as well as memory and storage, and can lead to potentially serious resource bottlenecks. Faced with these problems, administrators and antivirus vendors have made some progress in reducing the impact of login storms and other resource-intensive phenomena in virtual desktop environments, typically through improved scheduling and randomization, using AV agents on the desktop or other endpoint.
In contrast to these incremental improvements, agentless security appliances make a generational leap by offloading scanning functions to a separate virtual machine. This improves resource allocation as well as performance, and reduces operating expenses. What’s more important from a security point of view, however, is that attaching a security appliance to the hypervisor instead of trying to manage agents on each virtual desktop, gives the administrator 100% visibility into a Horizon View deployment. It alleviates to some extent the Rumsfeldian problem of not knowing what you don’t know.
We have just published Enabling VMware vShield Endpoint in a VMware Horizon View Environment. This paper answers the administrator’s question, “Why should I care?” with a clear conceptual overview and pointers to the right necessary downloads and documentation.
