VMWare Shared Folders Performance

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posted Jan 29, 2011, 2:19 AM by Michael Schollmeyer

Performance of VMWare Shared Folders

Using <strong>shared folders</strong> in <strong>VMWare</strong> can be a crappy slow experience. Help might be a flick of the wrist away.

Sharing folders between virtual machines and the host is a neat feature of VMWare. Sometimes, however, performance is not what you expect. Recently, listing folders on my Windows XP VM took minutes to complete.

Finally, this is a networking problem. Windows attempts to lookup <code>.host</code> using WINS and only continues after running into timeouts. The solution is to add .host to your hosts file. You can open hosts with your favorite text editor (fallback to notepad), it is located in %windir%\drivers\etc.

Just add

127.0.0.1 .host

into a seperate line and save the file. No restart required.

Thanks to Bemowski for sharing this on jmatrix.

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