We are experiencing significant reduction in file transfer rate and network speed with in our LAN between Virtual Machines running Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guest OSs, Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) installed is 12.1.2015.2015.
VMs with all features of SEP installed have file transfer speed of about 30 MB/sec vs 120 MB/sec with no SEP installed.
Network speeds measured using the iperf utility shows a similar speed degradation of 4 times, 350 Mb/sec vs 1400 Mb/sec.
To simplify and exclude all extraneous factors we performed file transfer and network speed test where all VMs are hosted on the same VMware ESXi virtualization hosts (Version ESXi 5.1.0 Build 1117900). All VMs are x64 and the ethernet adapters are VMXNET 3, VMWare tools are installed and updated to the latest versions. Virtualization Host CPU usage is 20% and Memory Usage is 40% during the test.
The only article I found on the subject was http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/sep-121-ru2.... We already had the power setting to high performance so the solution did not help our case.
We tried enabling only the relevant features of SEP, it did not result in any significant improvement. Only installing SEP Core or unistalling SEP completely seem to be the only solution.
This seems to be a much bigger trade off between Security and Network Speed than anticipated. Any suggestions and comments are welcome.