Wednesday, 28 December 2016

Anti-Virus Exclusions for VMware and Windows

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


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