I maintain a VMware environment with 60 virtual machines running on 2 physical servers. Our parent company "corporate policy" states every machines must update its KAV every 2 hours. While i don't disagree with that policy, they can't figure out a way to stagger the 2-hour updates. The effect of this is that every 2 hours, the CPU usage on the 2 VMware physical servers jumps from 40% up to 70% for about 2 minutes. You can see how this would cause a general slowdown across the entire environment of 60 machines. Is there some way to stagger when each agent updates?

Does anyone have experience with configuring KAV to run across virtual machines? And/Or configuring updates to still run every 2 hours, but stagger the start time so they aren't all running at the same time? Or any other ideas to keep everyone happy (myself and corporate)?

We have the same problem with weekly scans, but corporate was able to 'somewhat' stagger the scans and set them to run over the weekend overnight. Basically that means all the virtual machines are unavailable from midnight to 6am on the weekend due to 100% cpu usage across everything, but that is not as high of a concern right now.

Thanks,
Mark

if CPU usage jumps to 70% it means that you have more 30% non-utilized, so this should not cause any problems with application performance on these machines, right?

as a workaround, though, you could try to download updates on a dedicated separate machine in the local network by means of Kaspersky Administration Kit or with Universal Updater utility (search for it on support.kaspersky.com or here on this forum) and fetch updates quickly from that local resource in order to minimize the impact of the Updater task running on those machines...

You could set it to randomize every 2 hours

Thanks for the replies. i should have specified a little more to be clear:

hinote - The CPU utilization i was referring to was actually 5-min averages. When i look at the real-time CPU usage the physical server is at 100% CPU usage for 2-3 minutes, every 2 hours exactly. When i look at individual virtual machines i do see the avp.exe process using the CPU. We do have a dedicated local server that updates are downloaded to, then every 2 hours all the servers connect to it and download them.

Kavblues - yesterday they tried increasing the start time interval as much as possible with little/no effect at all. They said they couldn't increase it any more than what they did otherwise the servers may not have finished updating before the next 2 hour task starts.

When i look at the KAV "Settings: Update" it shows both the Kaspersky Administration Kit as well as Kaspersky Lab's update servers.

Thanks