Interested in people's opinion.
You have an application server running 3/4 services that do lots of TCP based communication to/from the server.
There is also a fairly heafty amount of MSSQL work going on too.
Do you run something like Symantec Anti-Virus with proactive/real time/heuristic/foo protection on the server?
Or do you perform full system scan nightly during a maintenance period?
This is all within the context of performance is of upmost importance.
All comments appreciated.
TIA
No. The attacks that servers and the custom apps running on them are vulnerable to are not the desktop malware problems that anti-virus targets. All AV on a server will do is reduce performance and stability.
(Unless of course the server is also being used as a desktop machine, to browse on and so on. But that's a really bad idea already.)
Depending on what the application is doing AV might have a role to play in that: for example if you've got a user file store as part of one of the apps it wouldn't hurt to check the files uploaded into it for viruses. And of course it's normal for an app that deals with mail to pass incoming mail to a checker.