Carbon Black Anti-virus

Ignition
1

Has anyone used Carbon Black anti-virus on an Ignition server?

I have a customer who wants to add this.

Thanks for any input.

2

I see there are no replies. I too would like to know if Carbon Black plays well with Ignition.

3

We use it where I work. We tested with RedCloak at first but switched to Carbon Black. There are few settings you need to enable for it work with Ignition. I don’t know what they are specifically as I wasn’t the one who handled it. It was setup on a Dev server first to determine the minimum permissions required to not interfere with Ignition. Once that was done, we added it to the production server without any issues. If I’m not mistaken, Carbon Black has engineering support to help determine the settings/permissions.

4

We used it for a period of time not on Ignition servers but on our company-wide workstations and laptops.

Not sure what other departments’ experience with it was but in development we hated it. Random slowdowns and other issues that we could never get rid of. We eventually moved on to something else (not sure what).

1 Like
5

Thanks for your response! That’s a good suggestions to set it up on a dev server first and use Carbon Black support. Kevin’s response below has me concerned, but I’m not sure I’ll have a choice.

6

Thanks Kevin. We may be in for a wild ride.

7

I have it on my Ignition Server. I don’t know a lot about it…I’m the Ignition Application owner but I’m not an IT person. It has been installed since I was running Ignition 7.9 and several versions of 8.0. I’m testing on 8.1 and it seems fine so far.

It’s listed in the control panel as “Carbon Black Cloud Sensor 64-bit”. The server is a Win Server 2016 Standard. It’s a VM running under Hyper-V.

The only thing we’ve seen since installation is a general increase in CPU load, but maybe only 5 or 10 percent.

This was also installed on the Windows Hyper-V physical server, and that caused BIG problems. This server hosts 7 vm’s and Carbon Black would appear to be okay for a while. But after about 5 days you could no longer see any of the VM’s in Hyper-V Manager. There were there, running, but you could not access them through the host. To recover we uninstalled, rebooted, and everything came back.

My understanding is that we worked with the CB team to make changes and there were several iterations of install, uninstall, reboot, but so far they have not been able to prevent this from happening. So the hosted VM’s are running CB but the physical host server is not.