- Mar 14, 2017
- 273
Hi All
There's something I've been thinking about recently that I would like to ask the forum for your opinions.
I run a lab at home with about 30 Windows Server 2016 servers. They all have Windows Defender installed and I have a Group Policy which enables/configures certain features like Cloud Based Protection. I never ever browse the internet from any of these servers (I use my desktop with my SUA account for internet activity) and I don't share my servers with anyone else.
What I was wondering is:
To free up memory on my cluster and to reduce disk IO I was thinking of uninstalling Windows Defender on Windows Server 2016 using Powershell as follows:
Remove-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender, Windows-Defender-GUI
Now obviously this would mean I would have no AV/malware on these test servers but since I don't browse the internet from any of these machines the risk should be minimal (note I said minimal as I do accept having no AV has its risks/downside which I accept).
I may keep Defender installed on some servers that have ports open from the internet like my mail gateway (anti spam etc) but besides this I can't think of any other reason to keep Defender installed. All servers are behind a pfsense firewall in different VLANs and have tight firewall rules controlling traffic between them.
I don't have any kind of third party AV/anti malware installed. Everything I download gets checked on my desktop before copying to any of my test servers.
Good idea to uninstall Defender? Bad idea to uninstall Defender?
There's something I've been thinking about recently that I would like to ask the forum for your opinions.
I run a lab at home with about 30 Windows Server 2016 servers. They all have Windows Defender installed and I have a Group Policy which enables/configures certain features like Cloud Based Protection. I never ever browse the internet from any of these servers (I use my desktop with my SUA account for internet activity) and I don't share my servers with anyone else.
What I was wondering is:
To free up memory on my cluster and to reduce disk IO I was thinking of uninstalling Windows Defender on Windows Server 2016 using Powershell as follows:
Remove-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender, Windows-Defender-GUI
Now obviously this would mean I would have no AV/malware on these test servers but since I don't browse the internet from any of these machines the risk should be minimal (note I said minimal as I do accept having no AV has its risks/downside which I accept).
I may keep Defender installed on some servers that have ports open from the internet like my mail gateway (anti spam etc) but besides this I can't think of any other reason to keep Defender installed. All servers are behind a pfsense firewall in different VLANs and have tight firewall rules controlling traffic between them.
I don't have any kind of third party AV/anti malware installed. Everything I download gets checked on my desktop before copying to any of my test servers.
Good idea to uninstall Defender? Bad idea to uninstall Defender?
