McAfee MOVE anti-virus

Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time.

McAfee now has a product especially for virtualized environments, McAfee MOVE (Management for Optimized Virtual Environments). After Trend Micro, McAfee is now the second anti-virus company, that I know of, which has a product especially for virtual environments.

McAfee’s Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform is combines speed ad security by significantly reducing the overhead of protecting individual machines in a VMware or Citrix virtual environment. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is not available yet.

McAfee MOVE does this by offloading all anti-virus tasks to an appliance/server which needs to be installed on each ESX host or XenServer in a cluster. The only McAfee components which needs to be installed on the virtual server or desktop is the McAfee MOVE client and the ePO agent.

McAfee MOVE integrates with ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) 4.5 patch 1 with which you can configure the MOVE client which than intercepts the traffic and scans it using the McAfee MOVE appliance/server. This means it can scan virtual servers and desktops online.

In general we tend to implement maximum protection on the endpoints which, with the traditional anti-virus approach, means a big load on the desktops. When running multiple desktops in a VDI scenario these big loads turn into a huge load on the ESX host or XenServer. This makes McAfee MOVE an ideal solution for VDI environments like VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop. Because the overall load of the combined desktops is lowered, the consolidation ratio can be much higher, lowering the cost of the virtual environment.

Below you can find the minimum system requirements. Actual requirements will vary depending on the nature of your environment.

Supported Virtualized Environments

Servers

Citrix XenServer 5.5 VMware 4.0

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Citrix XenDesktop VMware View

Supported Virtual Machine Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows XP (32-bit) Microsoft Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit)

MOVE Anti-virus for Virtual Servers Microsoft Windows 7 (x86, AMD64) Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 (AMD64) Microsoft Windows 2008 Server (x86, AMD64) Microsoft Windows Vista (x86, AMD64) Microsoft Windows XP (x86, AMD64) Microsoft Windows 2003 Server (x86, AMD64)

Virtual machine software installation 10 MB for MOVE client ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) agent