Antivirus can often be the nemesis of a good VDI design. If the antivirus solution is not configured in a way that is understanding of the shared nature of the VDI solution, it can often be the cause of large performance issues across the environment.

The first consideration with any optimized desktop solution is to ensure that you optimize your antivirus solution to be considerate to the use cases of the users and the applications that they are using. With a VDI solution, you often want to deliver just the right amount of resources to ensure that it meets the users' needs while not over-delivering resources that can have a knock-on effect on the overall cost of the solution. We have personally seen in VDI environments with misconfigured antivirus that double the CPU, RAM, and disk resources are required. Clearly, this could have a massive effect on the cost of the overall solution and, ultimately, your ability to deliver the project on a budget.

Secondly, full desktop scans need to be considered. You need to consider whether full scans are required at all on the desktops if they are being refreshed daily. If full AV scans are a defined requirement, ensure that they are run out of hours and staggered across the desktops. Simultaneously starting scans across all the desktops will affect the RAM, CPU, and the IOPS being consumed, and potentially cause knock-on effects across the environment.