Question

I'm trying to install anti-virus on a server running hyper-v with 3 virtual machines. I've tried one which (shall remain nameless) deleted(!) 2 of the VM's (luckily not the virtual hard disks though) when i re-booted the host and am now wary about trying any others. Can anyone recommend any anti-virus that works well with Hyper-V?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

In general you would not need to load an AV on the Hyper-V Hyper-visor (Which I assume is what your referring to). The Server Core underlying this is completely locked down and it will take some serious work to bring it down with a virus. Mainly it does not even run IE on this machine so most scripts etc. are pretty much harmless.

The McAfee corporate edition however does run on it but we ended up removing it off all our boxes running Hyper-V since it was really just using unnecessary processor cycles.

Answer 2

None!

Anything, even excluding the working directory of the VHD files can seriously reduce the speed of the VMs.

I have not found a good AV so far as they all seem to be good at one thing then terrible at another - e.g. scans the network traffic, which upsets VM networking.

Anyway, personally, I would leave the OS alone, keep it patched up but use it remotely.

Here is a article you may want to read from a Microsoft expert on Virtualisation.

Answer 3

I was running Grisoft AVG 7.5 (paid for version) on my Windows 2008 Standard Edition + Hyper-V (RTM) during a longish trial and proving ground period and didn't encounter any issues. There didn't seem to be an I/O performance hit either. The server was running the VM's off of it's internal SAS disks, not from a SAN store though.

I was running AVG with just anti-virus protection operational, i.e. not the AVG firewall, anti-spyware and other bits.