The vShield Endpoint component of the vShield suite is specifically designed to enable efficient scanning of virtual machines by interfacing with third-party endpoint vendors. By allowing a security appliance to scan many virtual machines, the computing resource requirements are offloaded to a single security appliance instead of 30 virtual machines, for example. Ordinary antivirus scans take place within the OS of each VM. The vShield Endpoint scanning takes place at the hypervisor level, which minimizes compute resources and has a positive effect on virtual machine performance, including the underlying ESXi host.

Antivirus scanning is key to detecting and mitigating new threats. Endpoint protection provides another layer in the defense-in-depth methodology. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Threat and Vulnerability Overview, defense-in-depth utilizes endpoint protection as a monitoring and control defensive layer.

The vShield endpoint installation and configuration involves vSphere...