Stand alone antivirus that’ll work with Server 2008 and Terminal Services

anti-viruswindows-server-2008

Good morning,

Ok, I'm looking for a good stand alone antivirus program that will work within Windows Server 2008 running Citrix/Terminal Services, without trying to deploy antivirus clients or trying to control the Terminal Services connections, it just needs to run in the background and protect the server itself.

I've spent a few hours now searching and haven't found anything for the server environment that's not an endpoint solution that wants to administrate the entire network's antivirus.
So far it looks like Nod32 or Kaspersky may do what I need, but, I can't see any definite yeah/nay on if they're going to behave on a server or if they're going to kill the TS connections/launch AV Clients.

Best Answer

I have used ESET NOD32 Business Edition on a terminal server with up to 80 concurrent users. No problems to report. If I recall correctly, the system tray process does run in each user session, but it's lightweight enough not to cause a problem. Of course, the UI is password-protected, so end users cannot make changes.

On the same terminal server, Symantec Endpoint Protection would cause the system to freeze periodically, as the client UI processes on each user session would work in concert to max out the CPUs (no small feat on a dual quad-core Xeon system). Symantec provided a hack to disable the UI component; this eliminated the freezes, but it introduced a new problem. Specifically, the disabled component apparently played a crucial role in scheduling or postponing reboots when they were needed to update the AV engine. So, every month or so, SEP would randomly reboot the terminal server for AV engine updates during the day, without any warning at all.

I definitely would not recommend Symantec/Norton AV for any purpose due to its unique blend of high cost and low performance, but it is especially detrimental to terminal servers.

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