McAfee has developed an antivirus product or virtulised environments. The company has partnered with Citrix to provide a means of protecting virtual machines in the same way that it can handle physical ones.
The system, known as McAfee Management for Optimised Virtualised Environments AntiVirus (Move AV) has been specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop to help customers protect corporate networks from malware.
Launched at the Citrix Synergy Europe conference, the two companies also announced that they were working together to integrate McAfee Move direct in the Citrix XenClient bare-metal hypervisor, so that protection would be delivered automatically.The development has been designed to help protect corporate systems as the trend towards desktop virtualisation continues.
Sai Allarvarpu, senior director product marketing at Citrix's networks product group said it was an example of how the groups listen to their customers. "In a traditional, physical world, then if you have a 1000 PCs, you need a 1000 anti-virus installations for each PC. In a virtual world, we had customers asking whether you would need a 1,000 licences for virtual machines. And McAfee saw an opportunity to innovate by supplying a service that can scan the traffic going out of each of the virtual machines, so if it can detect a problem in one virtual desktop then it can detect a problem in all the virtual machines."
If the software enounters any malware, it can process it according to the appropriate policy and also update all other machines supported by Move."McAfee is providing optimised security solutions specifically designed for virtualised environments," said Candace Worley general manager, endpoint protection business unit at McAfee. "McAfee and Citrix are giving customers security that is flexible, secure and designed to protect virtual desktops and server without impacting performance."