Following on from a Sponsored visit at LonVMUG, I decided to take a closer look at Bitdefenders GravityZone product as it sparked an interest I have in trying to locate the most optimal and performant AV solution in a virtualized environment whilst at the same time offering relative deployment simplicity. I’ve previously deployed Trend Deep Security (agentless) and whilst the product itself performs well when compared with a full fat agent deployment in a virtualized environment, I did find displeasure in having to perform a whole sequence of prerequisite changes in order to upgrade a core component of a previous client infrastructure (Trend Deep Security 9.5 didn’t work with vSphere 6 so a core Virtualisation upgrade resulted in a spawned off project to upgrade to Trend 9.6) . As you may or may not know, agentless AV deployments aren’t really fully agentless when they place a dependency on the vShield Endpoint driver that is installed inside the virtual machine. In effect this couldbe classified as an installation requirement and therefore an agent of sort as it is not installed into virtual machines via VMware tools by default.
With BitDefenders GravityZones, they offer a light agent deployment that to me sits somewhere between a full fat agent and a typical agentless deployment. The great news is that it takes away the dependency and complexity that vShield introduces to environments that just want to keep things simple. At the end of the day, AV needs to be easy to deploy, guaranteed to work and effective at doing its job.
I’ve successfully deployed Bitdefender into my homelab and will have a deeper look at how its feature set compares with competitor products.