We're at a point with our VMware infrastructure (and the one we're about to build) that it was time to find a better anti-virus solution for the virtual machines. I am really anxious about running a full blown client in a VM with questions such as:

1) how many resources could it consume
2) how will we update the signatures on VMware View linked clone virtual desktops
3) did I mention the question about resources?

So I called up Trend to talk about their Deep Security product. I wanted to test it out to find out if it was going to be worth the trouble, as in moving away from CA (our current AV solution) or working in conjunction with it (eg. Trend gets our virtual environment and CA gets the physical). Well, we decided to try a test run on some dummy VMs and a host I could hot add to the production vSphere environment. We got everything set up (server 2008R2, a few virtual desktops, vShield Manager, VMware Tools 8.6 with the Endpoint driver) and started to install their version 7.5 (because 8.0 isn't compatible with vSphere 4.1u2 yet) and then they tell me that I can't have vShield Manager 5 installed on vSphere 4.1 because Deep Security 7.5 isn't compatible with vShield 5... really!? By the way... in a month and a half, Trend is coming out with a service pack for Deep Security 8 so that it's backwards compatible with vSphere 4.1 AND vShield 5...

So instead of dropping down to vShield v1 (which is the version for vSphere 4.1) and then re-upgrading to vShield 5, I just decided to build an entire new lab for just the Trend proof of concept.

What does two Core2Duo boxes with 8 GB of ram each and one Core2Duo box with 2 GB of RAM get you?

This:

1 server 2008R2 domain controller with DNS
2 vSphere 5 servers running
-1 vCenter Server
-1 Trend Security server
-2 Windows 7 virtual desktops
-1 vShield Manager
-1 Deep Security 8.0 virtual appliance

All built entirely in a day. We just got done with the install today and I'd have to say, I'm pretty impressed with Trend's capabilities. We'll see how it actually stands up to a thumb drive full of viruses and no connection to the internet tomorrow :P