Over the years I had come across a lot of issues around OS performance where part of culprit has been to do with Anti-Virus settings. Leaving them as default settings can cause a lot of pain and headache. Here are some of the useful information I have gather from a couple of kb articles from VMware and Windows to help you get a better grip of what to scan in the guest OS to avoid wasting compute cycles especially if you are using public IaaS platforms.
- Exclude the folders from scanning for VMware tools or your installation of vCenter. Change the drive letter to reflect where you have installed the software :
- Windows Server 2012 "C:\Program Files\VMware\"
- Windows Server 2008 "C:\ProgramData\VMware\"
- Windows Server 2003 "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\
- Choose either to real-time scan on "Read" or "Write" try not to do both as you would waste processing power. My preferred option would be to real-time scan on "Write" as if during write you have scanned it then you could safety assume that the file was clean on writing to disk.
- Turn off scanning of Windows Update or Automatic Update database file "Datastore.edb" which by default for windows is at %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore
- Turn off scanning for logs files located in the following folder which by default is at %windir\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs specifically to exclude the following type of files edb*.jrs, edb.chk and tmp.edb
- Turn off scanning for the following type of files *.edb, *sdb, *.log, *.chk and *.jrs in the following directory %windir\Security\Database
- Exclude group policies settings files *.pol or to be specific they are within the following locations
- %allusersprofile%\ specifically NTUser.pol
- %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\ specifically Registry.pol
- %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\User\ specifically Registry.pol
KBs Article Used
- https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2062805 - Detail around vCenter
- https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/horizon-7-antivirus-view-app-volumes-thinapp-user-environment-manager.pdf - Details more for Window Client OSes but some can apply to Servers on page 4
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/822158 - Details about Windows OSes but also includes information around what exclude for an Active Directory Server, DNS server, DHCP server
