Antivirus software

If more than one GPFS Windows node is running antivirus software that scans directories and files, shared files only need to be scanned by one GPFS node. It is not necessary to scan shared files more than once.

When you run antivirus scans from more than one node, schedule the scans to run at different times to allow better performance of each scan, as well as to avoid any conflicts that might arise because of concurrent exclusive access attempts by the antivirus software from multiple nodes. Note that enabling real-time antivirus protection for GPFS volumes could significantly degrade GPFS performance and cause excessive resource consumption.

Tip: Consider using a single, designated Windows node to perform all virus scans.

Latest versions of Windows such as Windows 10 come with a built-in antivirus component known as Windows Defender. While performing real-time scanning of files, Windows Defender might memory-map these files even when they are not in use by any user application. This memory-mapping of files on GPFS file systems by Windows Defender in the background, can result in performance degradation. Therefore, it is recommended that GPFS drives or volumes be excluded from Windows Defender scans all together. Another side effect of this background memory-mapping of GPFS files by antivirus programs is that an attempt to compress or uncompress GPFS files from these Windows nodes might fail. For more information, see File compression and memory mapping.