Antivirus On OSX that Scans all Guests

[misterjangles]

This is possibly not achievable without cooperation from the anti-virus vendors but it seemed to me it would be useful- since parallels already provides the virtual hard-drive and memory, that it would be possible for anti-virus running in OSX to hook into this so you do not need to run anti-virus on any guest OS systems.

I suppose this could result in terrible I/O for the guests. Also maybe it is also impractical because the OSX anti-virus would have to be detecting windows viruses and, theoretically, linux viruses as well. also, i guess when it found a virus, it might not easily notify the guest OS in a friendly way.

This seems like a difficult request to fulfill, but since this is a wish list, I guess I will throw it out there.

 

[dkp]

If you can make the guest file systems available for mounting to OS X with NFS, Samba, or what ever method you can, then any virus scanner can to that now. I've done this with ClamAV running in OS X. I used NFS to attach the file systems of interest in a Solaris 10 environment and the scan went fine. It isn't the fastest way to do it - in fact it took twice as long than when I ran ClamAV natively in the Solaris VM.

ClamAV is both free and available for OS X, LInux, Solaris, Windows, and anything else you can build it to run on.

 

[misterjangles]

Yea that's a good idea. technically anti-virus could be running anywhere on the network if you're just doing scheduled scans.

i was imagining actual real-time hook into the virtual disk that could "spy" on all the I/O to check for virus code. i know it's possibly not a very reaslisic idea considering the difficulty to do it vs the amount of people that would want the feature.