VMware vShield Endpoint

VMware vShield™ Endpoint provides industry standard APIs to optimize antivirus and anti-malware security for virtual environments via integration with VMware partners. VMware vShield Endpoint allows security technology partners to offer more efficient antivirus and anti-malware protection for virtual hosts, including VMware View desktops.

vShield Endpoint offloads antivirus and anti-malware agent processing to a dedicated secure virtual appliance delivered by VMware partners. The solution is designed to leverage existing investments by allowing customers to manage antivirus and anti-malware policies for virtualized environments with the same management interfaces they use to secure physical environments.

• Offload antivirus and anti-malware functions from individual virtual machines to a centralized secure virtual appliance
• Streamline security management and protect against antivirus “storms,” performance bottlenecks and botnet attacks.
• Increase consolidation ratios and performance

• Satisfy compliance and audit requirements through logging of antivirus and anti-malware activities.

Endpoint Security for Virtual Desktop Deployments

Virtual Desktop (VDI) deployments are growing rapidly, but VDI  introduces new security challenges. Since virtual desktop solutions consolidate desktop processing onto centralized servers, resource-intensive tasks like virus scanning can have a significant impact on performance, necessitating additional server hardware and resulting in lower consolidation ratios.

VMware vShield Endpoint optimizes antivirus and other host and endpoint security for use in VMware vSphere, and VMware View, environments.

Offload key antivirus and anti-malware functions to a hardened, tamperproof security virtual machine, eliminating agent footprint. The robust and secure hypervisor introspection capabilities in vSphere prevent compromise of the antivirus and anti-malware service. vShield Endpoint plugs directly into vSphere and consists of hardened secure virtual appliance (delivered by VMware partners), a driver for virtual machines to offload file events, and VMware Endpoint security (EPSEC API) to link the first two components at the hypervisor layer

• Streamline antivirus and anti-malware deployment: Deploy enterprise antivirus engine and signature file to a single security virtual machine instead of each and every individual virtual machine on a vSphere host
• Improve virtual machine performance: Securely achieve higher consolidation ratios by the same offload mechanism as described above
• Reduce system requirements: Consolidate all antivirus updates to a secure virtual appliance
• Protect antivirus security software from attack: Deploy and run the antivirus and anti-malware client software in a hardened security virtual machine to prevent targeted attacks