Antivirus solutions for Windows Server 2008 (SP2) 64-bit?

Question

I'm configuring a new Windows Server 2k8 64-bit machine for the first time ever. In the process I realized I didn't have any antivirus software to install, nor did I know what was available for the OS.

So, I ask for your help in suggesting antivirus software that I can use with the server, and if possible one that will not mollest my bank account or require my first born child as payment.

The only companies I know of are Avira, Symantec, Kaspersky and McAfee (sp?), but I would like to avoid the last one...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It'll depend on how much filesystem activity you expect, and how tolerant you are of realtime scan lag.

NOD32's lightweight, but it doesn't scale.

Kaspersky's Enterprise AV has a setting that allows you to define how many processes are spawned to handle a load.

The more users are logged on to the server, the more I/O there is on the filesystem, same goes for Virtual Machines that may be running- heavy disk usage ensues.

The more processes there are, the more CPU cores are used to do the realtime scanning. So there's not one overburdened process making every process talking to the disk wait for it to start scanning file activity. It seemed expensive, but otherwise the AV can be a bottleneck.

The only reason I had to look into it was that NOD32 was a bottleneck on my Small Business Server 2008, because it would only use 1 core. Other processes would have to wait for it. After multiple service tickets they had me excluding what seemed like alot from realtime protection. As per their 'official' server configuration recommendations.

Answer 2

We use Symantec in house but have been looking to Microsoft's Forefront solutions. Haven't bit the bullet yet because their next version will have a different management scheme (I believe they are integrating it with System Center Ops Mgr).

No big complaints with Symantec - works well.

Answer 3

Eset NOD32 works fine for servers in my experience, the central administration is easy and the AV itself isn't very demanding on resources - on the contrary actually.

Answer 4

Kaspersky Antivirus for Windows Server's works pretty well on 2008/2008 R2 boxes, fairly low resource usage (Showing about 20MB RAM on one of our 2008 servers), doesn't slow down disk access too much and they don't cock the updates up too often.

They also do an Enterprise Edition if you're running it on Remote Desktop Services/Citrix XenApp servers, to handle the multiple users better.