VRC white paper about impact of AV on VDI performance – @LoginVSI, @LoginConsultant
New VRC white paper about impact of antivirus on VDI performance
The independent research initiative Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) released the long awaited ‘Phase V’ white paper which provides new insights in the impact and best practices of various antivirus solutions on VDI performance.
By testing and comparing different solutions and configurations Project VRC discovered the best practice to perform a pre-scan of the master image before deployment.
Another key finding is that antivirus off-loading architectures makes a big difference from a storage IO point of view, but not always from a session density point of view.
This Project VRC white paper with all Login VSI test results and best practices can be downloaded for free here:
Download the Project VRC white paper
Read other white papers based on tests with Login VSI
//Richard
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The IT Melting Pot! 
We saw the exact same numbers when running the tests on a customer’s site. The overhead is similar when running on XenApp and VMware. Worth noting is that the tests doesn’t take into account the Anti virus features but just the performance hit each product has. One more thing that, for instance, is not included in the Mcafee MOVE tests is the fact that MOVE offload servers more or less needs to be placed on the same host that the target it serves is placed. This will cause a management overhead to have different policies for each server to make sure it does not need to travel between hosts to get a file scanned. I think a more efficient way of scanning the files would be to keep a local copy of the scanning database that keep track of the files already scanned (McAfee MOVE is using checksums to check if a file is scanned) like the local IMA database. That would minimize the need for traveling across the network for each and every file that are being accessed. Not to mention the DRS functions that will migrate vservers between hosts. How do you keep the same offload server on the same host with that enabled? I know that MOVE and similar tecniques is fairly new to the scene and I guess we will have to see what the next versions will bring.