Mcafee VirusScan in Vmware Workstation

[psivius]

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone has installed Windows Vista as guest inside a VMWare Workstation virtual machine and also installed Mcafee VirusScan inside the VISTA guest. I've noticed the performance drop to practically unusable levels as compared to without the Mcafee antivirus, which runs pretty smoothly.

I'd like to know if this is a typical behaviour of a VM after an antivirus installation?

Many thanks...

 

[Conradl]

Add the vmware directory or the virtual disks to the mcafee exclusion list, this way it will not scan on each read and write twice (the container and the file in the VM). Are your VMs disks set to a fixed size or dymaically resized??

 

[psivius]

They are set to dynamically resize.

Could you clarify which exclusion list you are refering to (Guest or Host). It seems as if you are refering to the host exclusion list?

 

[Conradl]

Sorry, to make it clear I was referring to the Host exclusion list. What happens is that if you write to the guest disk, the guest AV will scan the file; then the host AV will scan the vdisk. The problem is made worse if the disk is set to dynamically resize, cause then the Host AV will scan each time the disk is incrementally increased in size. Fixing the disk size will increase the performance considerably....