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brendang
Contributor
Contributor

Certain applications don't work using shared folders

Hi all

A using shared folders between an XP guest and Vista host. I've gotten around the first problem I encountered which was extremely slow speeds--I added an entry to the lmhosts file on the host.

Now, it's fast, and I can read/write to the share in explorer, however certain applications that are reading off it are having problems.

For example, Outlook 2003...I'm trying to read a pst file off the share, but it says I don't have permission when doing a send/receive. I can delete emails however.

Also in Quicken, if there is a password set on the file, entering the password when opening doesn't work...

I've tried accessing both by the
.host path and by adding a network drive.

Has anyone else experienced things like this?

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9 Replies
surferdave
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

My experience with Quicken in a VM has been less than good. In fact, using the software outside of a VM (in Vista) has caused problems.

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KevinG
Immortal
Immortal

When you say " shared folders " are you talking about using VMware Shared folders or are you talking about "shared folder as in a network drive mapping?

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brendang
Contributor
Contributor

VMware shared folders. I did try setting up a public share on the host and using that, however the speeds unusably slow still. The only way I've been able to get around the transfer speed issue is by using VMware shared folders and then adding an entry into the host's lmhosts files (as found on these forums).

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KevinG
Immortal
Immortal

The VMware shared folder feature is beter if used to only move a file from host to guest or the other way around. If you need to read/write you should be using a network share

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brendang
Contributor
Contributor

OK thanks, I will try a network share...will make a new thread soon if I'm unable to fix the speed issue.

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WorkForFood
Contributor
Contributor

First, I apologize if resurrecting this thread is against protocol....

I am getting terrible performance on a Vista Host running XP VM's. The bottleneck appears to be accessing shared drives. I have implemented the recommended change to the lmhosts file but performance is still very poor. I saw the recommendation to use Windows networking but when I attempted "Windows only" mapping of network drives on the Vista host I consistently got prompted for authorization to access the shared drive. I might have been able to automate something to automatically fill in the authorization but it does not accept the uid/pwd of the Vista host! I could not find any combination of uid/pwd that would allow access (it's entirely my setup so I know all the uid/pwd that are in use) The shared drives can be accessed by other nodes on the network without issue, this constant prompt for authorization only occurs when a request to use the shared drive is issued by a VM.

I would be happy to do away with the dual layers of abstraction (mapping a .host shared file) but have not found a way to get around the constant authorization prompts. Does anyone have any ideas on what may be causing this? The performance I'm seeing is 10x-20x slower than expected.

Thank you.

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WorkForFood
Contributor
Contributor

I was able to successfully create the Windows share using just Windows networking. I went from having bad performance to having an outage. The mapped drives appeared to initially (for about 60 seconds) be faster to manually access using Explorer but it quickly degraded to having explorer "not responding" and I had to kill the explorer process. I am using bridged networking and as I mentioned all the mapped drives are on the Vista host that the VM is running on.

I'm just stumped on what to do to speed this dog up. Still looking for any possible ideas.

Thanks.

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WorkForFood
Contributor
Contributor

I was able to correct the problem by eliminating all vmware shared directories, explicitly sharing all mount points (4 mapped drives, 4 shared directories even though they were all under a single directory), removed the lmhosts entry, ran nbtstat -R, then mapped the directories using Windows only networking. Performance was 8-10x faster when accessing data and better yet none of the applications are locking up. It was like figuring out a the combination of combination lock. It would appear to me that more thorough testing of the VMWare product would help eliminate the guess work for the users.

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nextech
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Brendang,

I had a similar problem, from my experience the problem seems to be related to "Large Send Offload" being enabled on the host network adapter. This seems to be very common among machines with an Intel-based gigabit ethernet adapter in the host machine. It seems to be common on Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux users that all seem to have a Gigabit Ethernet adapter (usually an Intel 1000 based adapter) or they have a network adapter that supports Large Send Offload, and for some reason this seems to be enabled by default, and it seems to cause problems with VMWare products. I posted the correct solution to this problem with detailed instructions 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

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