So for the guys out there who have read a few of my blogs, they know that before I came to eGroup I spent 11 years on the customer facing side of IT, administering storage, VMware, Citrix, etc.. One of my roles during that time period was also managing antivirus on desktops and servers, a fairly critical task because no one wants to have a major virus outbreak. It was never a fun task though, DATs were a pain, so was versioning, and hoping that it was working and that it was actually updating never made you feel good! Well, as I made the jump to my new career at eGroup I had my eyes opened to a new world of technology that I had not been exposed to previously, one of those was Trend Micro's Deep Security. As a VMware administrator I played around with different antivirus solutions trying to find one that didn't impact CPU utilization on my hosts and virtual machines severely, if it was an antivirus solution I tried it at least once and yet all of them seemed to impact my VM's CPU ranging from about 10% to sometimes closer to 30%. I always thought this was ridiculous and that there had to be a better way, well apparently the guys at Trend thought so as well and came up with a solution. Read more after the bump to see how it works!<!--more-->

Have you ever put any thought into how to protect your hosts? Most people haven't they load antivirus on their virtual machines and go about their day, never thinking that their hosts could be hacked or infected. At the end of the day if that were to happen the trickledown effect would take down everything on that host and most likely other hosts with it. Deep Security stops this problem! By protecting VM's at the host level and removing "traditional" agents from your virtual servers and desktops you know that from the top down you are good to go. Remember that performance hit we were talking about earlier? Yeah it's gone!

What does this mean to you? Well, a couple things... First off your virtual desktops and servers are now performing better, in fact you may be able to remove a CPU from some of your VM's. Additionally if you are a large enough shop and you shave off 15% CPU utilization off of every VM you have you may be able to remove a host or two, paving the way for further consolidation! It doesn't just end at antivirus either Deep Security has a myriad of protection underneath its hood that you can choose from. See below.

-Anti- Malware Protection for VMware

-Intrusion Detection and Prevention

-Application Control

-Integrity Monitoring

-Web Application Protection

-Log Inspection

The reality is many people have additional software or even hardware to take care of some of these items, with Deep Security you can remove that and leverage its maximum functionality and be closer to a truly virtualize "cloud" model. If you find any of this intriuging I would highly recommend you take a look <a href="http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/business/white-papers/wp_changing-the-game-for-antivirus-vmware.pdf" target="_blank">here</a> and read this <a href="http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/business/white-papers/wp_changing-the-game-for-antivirus-vmware.pdf" target="_blank">whitepaper</a>. It details all the inner workings and how it can help your VMware environment!

Before I close out if you take a look below you can check out the following diagram and it shows a great depiction of how Deep Security is laid out!

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