I've got dozens of network computers which I need scanned for malware on a regular basis. I want to set-up a local Windows server (one or two physical machine(s) depending on the workload) which will handle the scanning on a regular basis - this way I don't have to install any anti-malware on the client machines. I want to use more than a single anti-malware product; for example I want to use ESET NOD32 AV, AntiVir, AVG, Prevx and so forth.
I am a programmer myself, though I do not have much experience on this subject. My idea is to have a simple client program running on each machine, that regularly sends all it's files to the central server. The central server receives a file -> scans it using all the anti-malware produtcs -> returns result to client. This loop goes for every file on every client.
Writing the software to do this is not the problem here though. My problem is I can't figure out how to run let's say 10 anti-malware products on the central server (windows server 2008) at the same time. One possible way to do it is to run a Virtual Machine for each scanner, but this quickly eats up the server resources. 10 WMs running on 2 or 4gigs of ram doesn't really work.
Other than that I am out of ideas. Depending on which scanner version is used (Home Edition, corporate etc) some won't even install next to others.
Ideally I want to have a lightweight separate environment for each scanner so if one crashes I can just restart the environment. Also running a scanner in each separate environment ensures no scanner conflicts can arise. It would also be easy to code and maintain (send file to env1 -> env2 -> env3, without the need to care of what's going on inside. Kind of black-box like). Again, the only way I know how to do this is by using for example VMWare workstations and have a lot of them run concurrently. But this cannot be very performance friendly?
If the separate environments can't be done maybe it would be possible to "extract" only the on-demand scanners from the different products. If I could install all the products without the bell and whistles (on-access scanners etc) then it would be like having a few exe files on the computer for each product which is then executed on the file to be scanned. This would be really good, but I don't know how to achieve this setup as most of the products come in a "package".
I really need some good ideas and suggestions on how to do this most optimally. Would appreciate your suggestions very much.
Thanks.
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