Vulnerability Scanning from a Virtual Machine

Virtualization offers a wide array of benefits from power and environmental constraints to physical space limitations and disaster recovery efforts. As leaders for Unified Vulnerability Management, we realize these benefits offer a significant value to our install base and we are in full support of virtualization for our solutions.

Although virtualization is in many ways identical to running on physical hardware from a software perspective, there are certain caveats that are unique to a connection-sensitive application such as a vulnerability assessment scanner. Having an extremely diverse customer base, including some of the largest deployments of vulnerability assessment, Retina has had a significant amount of experience across various environments and the challenges that can go along with them.

As virtualized environments and configurations vary widely, we can provide some guidance for scanning from these environments and anomalies you may encounter. Regardless of the scanning solution, best practice guides, minimum prerequisites, and user documentation should be adhered to during the installation of the products. eEye has developed a set of recommendations that will optimize the solution in a virtual environment and minimize any potential run times errors or scan anomalies:

Dedicated Network Interface Cards

MS SQL Database

Dedicated Virtual Machines

Industrial Virtualization Suites