Shared folders slow

[Maxime1]

Hi,

I installed Fusion 1.1b1 on my new 24" iMac a few days ago, all went fine.

I enabled Shared Folders, shared my Mac's User/Documents folder, and redirected WinXP's "My Documents" to point to the share. The idea quite naturally is to have a single repository for my docs, regardless of whether they're Win or Mac.

Now the problem: Browsing the share in XP is so slow is makes it barely usable. I know network shares can be slow - that is, if they actually go over the network - but here it is really on the same host, I would have expected it to be such that you would not notice the difference when compared to a regular directly attached USB disk for instance.

Anybody experiences the same issue? Any setting I can make to improve the performance? Any other idea?

NB: My VM's network is in bridged mode.

Thank you.

Regards,

Maxime

[admin]

I myself find that a network share from host (Mac) to guest (virtual machine) is faster than Shared Folders. If your virtual machine is in bridged mode and stays that way all the time, and if your host Mac has a fixed IP address (or you can arrange for it to always get the same address from your DHCP server), this is the ideal case for using ordinary network shares. My desktop Mac is set up this way, and I've always been pleased with the performance.

The key virtue of the Shared Folders feature is that it doesn't depend on IP addresses or network modes. So, for example, on my Mac laptop, which gets different IP addresses all the time, and on which I sometimes have to put my virtual machine into NAT mode, I use Shared Folders and just deal with the comparative slowness.

[korpy]

Hi,

I myself find that a network share from host (Mac) to guest (virtual machine) is faster than Shared Folders. If your virtual machine is in bridged mode and stays that way all the time, and if your host Mac has a fixed IP address (or you can arrange for it to always get the same address from your DHCP server), this is the ideal case for using ordinary network shares. My desktop Mac is set up this way, and I've always been pleased with the performance.

Thanks for the tip. This brings me to the following addition. If you don't have connnetcion all the time but want to use the bridged mode for that usage, you might want to add a second network interface in host mode only. You can use that interface to access your mac share even if you don't have a wired/or wireless connection available.

regards -frank-

[Maxime1]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. Wouldn't that require Windows Sharing to be turned on though?

In the meantime I just found a solution to the problem: Instead of using My Network Places, I mapped a network drive pointing to the shared folder and it works like a dream. Then I used WinXP's Powertoy TweakUI to point special folders like 'My Documents' to the network drive and all is fine.

Maxime

[atcf]

I'm an AutoCAD user and need Windows environment to do so.

After many try, I experience the speed of opening a .dwg file (usual size between 2MB to 10MB) in Windows XP Professional in the following order:

1. at Windows native C:\ drive

2. at
.host\Shared Folders\.... through Fusion

3. at (drive letter):\.... also through Fusion

The last way is extremely extremely extremely slow in both opening, saving & closing and has bothered me for a long time until I decided to copy all working files at C:\ to alleviate the situation.

After reading postings at My Communities, I try the second way (with modification at the 'hosts' file) and the speed seems to improve, though not as good as the first one in particular for the 'short pause' after entering the command.

Similar speed problems also happened at other files beyond .dwg.

Hope that VMware can deliver a solution in their coming updates.

(I'm using Fusion 2.0.3 and MacBook Pro 2.6 GHz Intel with OS X 10.5.6)

[AC66]

I'm seeing long delays with 3. as well.... ie. difficulty accessing files through Drive_letter:\folder. Mostly it works just fine when using Explorer to browse the drive... but when using applications that access files kept on Drive_letter:\folder, things seem to hang quite often. And at that point, even using Explorer to browse the drive hangs.

This is all on a Macbook Pro 3.0Ghz and XP Pro running on VMWare Fusion.

Will try out 2. to see if it helps at all.

Anyone else solved this?

[nextech]

Maxime,

I had a similar problem, I posted the correct solution to this problem here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1191790#1191790

I hope this helps, I believe this should solve your problem. Please

close this thread out, and mark it as "Answered" and If you find

this answer helpful, please do take the time to award me the "Correct Answer" points.

Thank-you!

Mark