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        Improving Performance - Antivirus Exclusions on Hyper-V

Section(s): Performance and Scalability
Published on Jan 14, 2009.
Last Modified on Nov 02, 2008.
Last Modified by Robert Larson.
Rating: Not Rated

Antivirus software can significantly degrade performance on a Hyper-V host. Using these exclusions in you antivirus software can help solve the problem

Antivirus software's job is to pretect you from bad things. They interrupt evey call to disk or memory and see if anything bad is happening...that is a good thing because it makes you machine safer, it is a bad thing becuase some things do not need to be scanned. Antivirus software differ in how they allow exclusions, some do processes, some file extension, some directories.

You can improve performance on Hyper-V by excluding the following processes from being scanned

VMMS.EXE

VMWP.EXE

VMSWP.EXE

Also exclude the root directory that contain your Virtual machines and configuration files

Also exclude the following files extensions

VHD, VSV, ISO, AVHD, VFD, and XML,

About Robert Larson

Robert Larson is the co-author of the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit, and the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource kit, both published by Microsoft Press. Robert has over 20 years experience in the engineering and IT field. Currently an architect with Microsoft Consulting Services, Robert focuses on helping customers design and deploy optimized data center and server infrastructures using physical and virtual approaches. Robert has been working with various virtualization technologies for over 4 years and is a regular speaker at Microsoft TechEd conferences in the US and Europe on the Microsoft virtualization stack. Robert has also written whitepapers and delivered webcasts on virtualization technologies. You can visit Robert's blog