Improve Hyper-V performance with configuring antivirus exclusions

Let’s look at what exclusion configuration should look like. On Hyper-V host you’ll find couple of core processes that’s crucial to host and VM performance.

Prevent following processes from AV scans by excluding following as part of Hyper-V AV policy:  
VMMS.exe | VMWP.exe.

Also exclude root directories where VM configurations and Virtual Hard Disks are stored:  
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V   
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks, Custom VM configuration, Virtual Hard Disk and Snapshot directories.

 Next, create AV exclusions for following file extensions:  
*.XML | *.VHD | *.AVHD | *.VFD | *. VSV | *.ISO. |*. BIN

• XML files
• These files contain the virtual machine configuration details.  There is one of these for each virtual machine and each snapshot of a virtual machine.  They are always named with the GUID used to internally identify the virtual machine or snapshot in question.
  
  
• .VHD files
• These are the virtual hard disk files for the virtual machine
  
  
• .AVHD files
• These are the differencing disk files used for virtual machine snapshots

• .BIN files
• This file contains the memory of a virtual machine or snapshot that is in a saved state.
  
  
• .VSV files
• This file contains the saved state from the devices associated with the virtual machine.

Finally, if you’re using Hyper-V R2’s Live Migration feature with CSVs, then you’ll need to exclude CSV path and any sub-directories. CSV path is as follows: C:\Clusterstorage. Failure to create this exclusion on hosts using CSV, can only result in poor performance, but can also result in a missing or corrupt VM configuration.


Guidelines for Antivirus Exclusions