Bad news for VMware VI Enterprise customers everywhere. I just found out I have 110 unsupported production and development VMs in my datacenter. Symantec published Document ID 2008101607465248 on 10/15/08 removing VMware VMotion support from its Symantec Antivirus (SAV) and Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) products.
Operating systems impacted are: All Windows operating systems.
Reported issues include but are not limited to:
- Client communication problems
- Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) communication issues
- Content update failures
- Policy update failures
- Client data does not get entered into the database
- Replication failures
This is of grave concern as many enterprise datacenters and VDI deployments are going to be impacted. My personal take is that someone jumped the gun in publishing a document with mysteriously vague detail, but we’ll have to wait and see what shakes out.
I hope that VMware can approach Symantec to get this resolved ASAP. It’s in everyone’s best interest.
Thank you vinternals for the heads up on this.
Update: Symantec has updated their support document stating that the problems a few customers have seen may or may not be related to VMware and VMotion. Until further notice, Symantec is supporting their products on VMware with VMotion. If you experience an issue with Symantec products, please contact Symantec technical support. This confirms my opinion that someone at Symantec jumped the gun by issuing the 10/15/08 support document stating VMware and VMotion is unuspported. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief now. Or at least I can.
Even before I read the vinternals post I was thinking “are these just common Symantec reliability problems that they can’t find a solution for?”.
The good news is that McAfee fully supports it and would be more then happy to have your business…
Maybe I’m just need sleep, but it seems abit unclear to me. Does this that all vm guests using sep are unsupported, or that the sep server itself is unsupported as a vm? Or both?
Any SAV or SEP code running inside a guest VMware VM which has VMotion enabled is unsupported.
Although you don’t specifically say, I presume it is the case that, with your 110 VMs, you have never experienced any of the issues that Symantec alludes to?
Gary, my 110 VMs at work run SAV and VMotion and I’m not experiencing any of the described issues.