Agentless Anti Virus recommendations or advice anyone?

[LenChaney]

Everyone,

Since everyone here has experience with the wonders of agent-less functionality and is probably somewhere in the decision or implementation of agentless anti virus, I was wondering if anyone had any advice, experience, or recommendations they'd like to share. Currently, we have dropped our old agent base tape backup and are using Veeam Backup and Replication as well as Veeam One monitoring and really like it. Now, we are going to venture into agentless anti virus and reap the benefits of dropping the agents in this area if we can do this and maintain the appropriate levels of virus protection.

Currently we use Symantec but they don't have an agentless offering. It looks like the only two are Trend and Kaspersky.

Len

[chrisdearden]

From what I have seen of the trend solution its pretty good - I think they were first to market with such a product so have plenty of experience with it. Its well worth trying out.

[dellock6]

Hi Len, I attended the Trend Micro Deep Security training, and I can say the product is really good. They probably helped VMware to develop vmsafe libraries, since their solution was available since day 1 of vSphere 4.0, when those libraries came out. Other vendors are catching up, but I never had the chance to test their solutions. AFAIK, also McAfee has a similar solutions.
For sure is worth a try.

Luca.

[LenChaney]

Thanks both Chris and Luca. I appreciate the reply and advice based on experience. What VMWare component, if any, do I need to purchase or license on my vSphere 5.x servers to make this work. I was thinkig vCenter Protect because of the name but the free videos only mention patch/update management.

I could read the documents but this is my last day before Christmas vacation and I'd rather clean my desk and eat cookies for the rest of the day

Thanks,

Len

[dellock6]

Hi Len,
you need vShield Endpoints licenses.

Luca.

[deevie]

vShield Endpoint licenses don't exist anymore since version 5.1
Problem is you can't use Deep Security on 5.1 yet.

[dellock6]

Not completely right, vShield Endpoint is included at no extra price in vSphere 5.1 with Standard or higher license.
For the 5.1 support, you need to wait for the upcoming Deep Security 9.

Luca.

[LenChaney]

Yeah, back from Christmas vacation and ready to look further into VMWare AV

I just checked as I have vSphere 5 Essentials and see no vShield Endpoint licenses. I see VMSafe (both in 4.x and 5.1) but that does not appear to be the same. I noted that VMWare referred to VMWare as a "partner ecosystem program delivered by VMware" (http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2010/04/ ... e-api.html) which probably means that this is the API that the vendors use but not the license.

Now, I at least know I might have an issue with my Essentials licenses. I'll check with VMWare and Trend to be able to use with Essentials.

Again thanks. It is much better to check these things out early rather than have a big "gotcha" a little later.

Len