Time Machine backup of VM user/app data in a shared folder

[whoahh]

Hi All,

I am an asp.net developer and am considering moving to mac and changing my dev environment to be all VM based.

I plan to run multiple VMs simultaneously, 1 for Visual Studio, 1 for SQL Server, etc.

This will all be on a laptop, by the way.

I like what i've seen with Time Machine for hourly backups of files. What I would like to do is have TM backup my VS.NET project files and SQL DB files.

I think I can achieve this by:

-creating a folder on the mac and sharing it.

-Then in each Windows VM I would map the shared folder as a network drive.

-Then in my win apps I would use the new mapped drive as my data store instead of the default locations on C:

What do you think?

1. This will probably work, right?

2. What will the VM performance be like if it is writing its data to the mac drive, which in theory is a different computer over the network, instead of the VM's own drive?

3. I've read general VM performace tips that say to run your VM images on external drives instead of laptop internal drive. Am I offsetting the external drive performance gain by using a mac shared folder as my data store?

Much thanks

[admin]

Theoretically this should work, but shared folders are a bit wonky and I believe Visual Studio is known to have some issues. A network share from OS X may work better, but the principle is the same.

The reasons performance would improve when using an external drive is that the guest is not competing with the host for disk access and because some external drives are faster than laptop drives. Using a share of some sort from the internal drive will negate these advantages when accessing the shared files, but my guess is that you will still see some benefit from the parts which are not shared.