I am trying to find a solution for antivirus and antispam that works well in a Microsoft terminal server environment. We previously had McAfee, but it has proven to be a major resource hog. Any one have any good suggestions and why? We run Windows 2003 Standard on all our servers. We need to protect 5 terminal servers, a file servers, two domain controllers, a number of software software servers, and about 40 laptops and desktops.
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I tend to stay away from the major brands anti-virus software just because they tend to be resource hogs and really aren't that good at all. We also use Mcafee in our corporate environment and it fails on so many levels.
AVG and Trend are pretty good, although I probably prefer something like F-Prot anti-virus or even Avast.
Both Avast and F-Prot should be pretty light on memory usage.
Firstly, what are the specs of these severs, (Make and model if not)
You can always start buy using the free version of Malwarebytes for malware(available at http://www.malwarebytes.or
If your servers are more recent, or you have about 512MB free or greater (hopefully), I'd recommend Symantec Endpoint Protection as your Antivirus solution, which seems to be pretty effective, however it doesn't play well with computers that don't exceed it's requirements; I've found it works fine on recent netbooks even, so it's worth taking a look into.
I agree with Marine7275 however, Kapersky is a viable option as well; I'd beg to differ with McAffee folks, however so far I've seen their installations corrupted by some not so dangerous Malware to the point of having to use their uninstaller repair tool to successfully remove it, to either re-install, or install another removal and protection solution.
This website gives a comparison of different antiviruses, might be useful:
www.av-comparatives.org
Take a look at Sophos. We're moving to them when our NOD32 license expires. They cater strictly to businesses (small and large) and their detection rates are top notch. They live and die by their antivirus product unlike behemoths like McAfee and Symantec. I believe they also support TS environments, though I'm not quite sure if you're seeking client or server spam filtering. Can't vouch for performance yet.
Last week we got three different "zero-day" viruses that bypassed our three different antivirus solutions (nod32/Antivir/and sonicwall), but when I scan the viruses online using www.virustotal.com, Sophos detected them all.
I don't know how much of a viable solution Panda's security suite is, but I would agree with WumpusHunter and kaboosky; Sophos is a pretty solid solution, but does produce a good amount of false positives, however this is the case in more and more antivirus solutions so it is to be considered the norm from the nature of program heuristics or registry keys in some perfectly safe applications. Honestly, I would recommend Symantec End Point Protection or CA Antivirus; however that Panda USB vaccine tool seems to be simple, and effective to provide a quick and easy means of preventing autorun based USB Storage Device attaching infections from propagating throughout your network. The pros being it is free, and can be used by the average user.
Trend Micro ServerProtect is the way to go for Terminal Servers:
http://tinyurl.com/nhrd5p
It only runs as a single instance on the server, so you won't have an instrance running for every user session. They are still in beta for Server 2008 at this time, but it is supported on your 2003 server.
889515, IT Desktop Support is right on. We have used F-secure for 4 of our servers for over 2 years now, and have been virus free. You can download a 30 trial version to test it out.
http://www.f-secure.com/en
We have been using NOD32 for several years now and it has performed flawlessly! I also had a client a few days ago catch a new variant of an old virus. My client, and a few other users noticed it the same day and reported it on the ESET forums. ESET's tech's emailed me a manual tool within minutes that removed it.
Symantec on the other hand has caused issues for us, another large customer of ours, which rendered their ERP dead for a time. McAffee seems a bit desperate these days by adding their AV to just about any piece of free software on the web.
I'm all in for ESET's NOD32.
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by: marine7275Posted on 2009-05-01 at 12:51:53ID: 24282845
I have always been a Symantec, Trend Micro, and AVG fan, but http://www.kaspersky.com/a
Symanetc tends to be a resource hog, but if you have the extra memery to make it hum, I would go with it.
Less resource intensive but really good solutions are Trend and AVG.
Kapersky works well with larger enterprises.