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Kaspersky to Protect Virtual Machines Running on VMware

23.05.12

There are two approaches to protecting operating systems and applications that run on VMware-based hosts: agent or agentless security software, according to Peter Beardmore, Kaspersky's senior director of product marketing.

Using the agent-based approach, for which Kaspersky also offers products, the security software is installed on each virtual machine. That works, but there are drawbacks, Beardmore said.

For example, a phenomenon called AV storm can occur when the antivirus software running on each virtual machine on a physical host wants to update its malware signature database at the same time, which in turn causes a drop in overall performance on the host.

Also, having software running on each virtual machine eats storage and memory capacity, and when a virtual machine comes back from being inactive there is a "window of opportunity" for hackers to strike before the software has been updated and the machine scanned, according to Beardmore.

Kaspersky's Security for Virtualization uses the agentless approach, which sidesteps those drawbacks by running one instance of the antivirus software to protect all the virtual machines on a host or in a cluster, according to Beardmore. The software, which runs on its own virtual machine, automatically detects, scans and protects every virtual machine.

Source: PCWorld