For VMware-based virtual environments, vendors are able to offer agentless security products that make use of a special feature in VMware vSphere to access the file systems in the virtual machines.
Whereas agent-based security products require the full security agent and its database to be replicated on every virtual machine on each host,these agentless security applications only need one instance of the antimalware database and one virtual machine that’s dedicated to security in order to protect every virtual machine that is running on that host.
Agentless security products can protect virtual servers and virtual desktops, while having no significant impact on hypervisor performance. Compared with traditional agent-based security, agentless solutions place much less demand on the host machine’s CPU, memory and storage so IT departments can achieve:
• Higher guest virtual machine densities.
• Higher performance for critical applications and business processes.
• Easy deployment and automatic protection of the newly created virtual machine.
• Higher return on investment.
Furthermore, with only one dedicated security virtual machine, malware scanning storms and security database/application update storms are eliminated.
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