5nine has released a free version of its 5nine Security product, called 5nine Security for Microsoft Hyper-V with built-in Security and Compliance Scanner v1.0. 5nine Security for Hyper-V Free provides a host-based / agent-less security solution for virtual machines running on top of Hyper-V. The product is also availble in paid versions (Standard and Datacenter editions) which ofcourse provide more functionality, as detailed in this product comparison.
The solution provides anti-virus and anti-mailware scanning for hosts and virtual machines, a virtual firewall, and control over each VM – which are controlled using a centralized management console, via PowerShell of via WCF APIs. The built-in Security and Compliance Scanner will help you to investigate present and potential security problems on your server. It also performs an aggressive anti-malware scan on a server during the overall scanning process. Upon scan completion Security and Compliance Scanner provides detailed reports on each identified security issue.
On the website of 5nine the company states the following about its agentless approach:”Thanks to its innovative agentless design, which installs nothing on the virtual machine itself aside from a VM Active Protection Agent”. Whether this means that an agent (the VM Active Protection Agent) needs to be installed within the VM is unclear, especially since 5Nine states that this a agentless solution. A slide in a white paper actually explains that the installation of an agent is optional in case you need it.
Update: 5nine explained that the Free 5nine Security for Microsoft Hyper-V with built-in Security and Compliance Scanner does not have a possibility to put a VM Active Protection Agent in. It only performs completely agentless full system anti-virus scans. VM Active Protection Agent is currently only available in the paid version of 5nine Security for Hyper-V Standard and is expected to become available for the Datacenter edition in December this year.