I have the latest WS 5.5.
All my guests are XP32, the host is also XP32 - 4gb ram, AMD X2 4800, with fast disks.
I find Shared folders are horrendously slow. When navigating through them in Explorer it can take 30 seconds before the folder contents display. Once I'm in the folder access is general quick, but if I leave it and come back a short while later (even as short as 1 minute later), and then try to do something (select the files, right click on a file, anything) Explorer will again freeze for 30 seconds before anything happens.
When I do eventually get to the point where I can copy a file, it seems fast enough. And I have pointed Symantec Ghost to the shared folder as its location to backup the drive, and the time it took seemed resonable (1.5 minutes to High compress and backup a 3gb drive). However the huge browse times make frequent use of these folders highly annoying.
I've searched and found numerous old posts reporting the same problem - but most of them have no replies. I take it therefore that this is an inherant problem with shared folders and they are not intended to be a replacement for a network share.
I'm going to use a network share mounted as a drive instead - I just thought I'd post this in case there is an word from VMWare as to whether it will be fixed in future, and as help for others if they experience the same issue.
For what it's worth, we believe we fixed something like this in the WS6 Tools. The problem we encountered had to do with Windows' concept of network providers. These are loaded into explorer via dlls and are responsible for translating the
stuff namespace into appropriate filesystem requests. Anyway, Windows likes to put LanmanWorkstation at the top of the list, which means it gets first crack to requests for
.host\Shared Folders.
Unfortunately, LanmanWorkstation also takes a very long time to timeout, which makes the first access to any share take forever (because LanmanWorkstation must time out, and only then does the HGFS provider get to run). Note that this should only affect share discovery, not file transfers.
For WS6, we worked around this by installing the HGFS provider at the top of the list. Check out HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order to see what I mean.
More information here:
My guest OS is Linux. It is so slow it is unusable. This is on a new Dell D630 laptop. The same VM works fine on Dell D620 laptop. I It is still slow after restinalling the VMWare tools. It is copying a few KB about every 30 seconds.
Can you please tell me how to map a shared folder to a logical drive?
Thanx in advance
Still a problem with WS 6.1 at least.
Yeah, PST files die unless you just use plain old SMB share...
Brian,
I had a similar problem, I posted the 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
This has annoyed me for ages and I have finally found the proper cause/solution:
This slow performance, specially the 5-10 seconds delay between clicking on a folder/file and actually getting it opened, happens because Widnows is trying to access the share via NetBIOS protocol. Once the NBT attempt fails windows reverts back to TCP, which then works OK.
So the solution is to disable netbios over TCP/IP on all network interfaces inside the Windows client.
Hope this helps more people out there.
This is really bad advice. Don't just take a sledgehammer and disable NetBIOS "on all network interfaces inside the Windows client". There are reason for keeping NetBIOS active and I have several VMs that have it enabled and that do not suffer from any performance degradation while browsing the guest file system as a share to the host.