Host access now incredibly slow

If I access a shared file on the host through the network the access times are awful. The network performance is crawling along. It takes hours to copy large files. However when accessing other machines on the network the access times are lightning as I'd expect. This slow network performance makes Windows Virtual PC redundant for use as a test bed for servers. Microsoft Virtual PC was superb for this and we seem to have gone backwards. I really don't understand how this could have happened. I can't face getting VMWare.

try to configure the vm to have a physical ip, i.e., bridged network. The default NAT is much slower.

Can we do this on VMLite by changing it to Bridged Adapter or Internet Network?

mxcolin said:

If I access a shared file on the host through the network the access times are awful. The network performance is crawling along. It takes hours to copy large files. However when accessing other machines on the network the access times are lightning as I'd expect. This slow network performance makes Windows Virtual PC redundant for use as a test bed for servers. Microsoft Virtual PC was superb for this and we seem to have gone backwards. I really don't understand how this could have happened. I can't face getting VMWare.

Hi - if you don't like vmware -- not sure why as it's fast, efficient and works properly (especially latest release Workstation 7 or the new FREE vmware player) you could always try Virtual Box -- also seems to have good reports on this Forum.

Vmware server - also free is pretty good but you need a bit of expertise to get it going.

The NIC is often a bottleneck in VM guests -- it's hard to design but if the software could be modified to access shared disks directly through the REAL NIC rather than the virtual Network interface then you'd gain a HUGE performance improvmemnt in I/O times.

This type of approach is used in commercial "Thin Servers" such as ESX.

If you must go throw the machines's virtual network then as a previous poster suggests use BRIDGED rather than NAT - at least in this case you shgould get a 1GB / s network transfer through the virtual network (Of course access to other disks on your LAN are dependent on the HOST's network adapter and how fast that can access LAN drives).

Cheers
jimbo.

HughShaw said:

Can we do this on VMLite by changing it to Bridged Adapter or Internet Network?

Yes, you can also configure network to bridged network in VMLite to improve the performance.

mxcolin said:

This slow network performance makes Windows Virtual PC redundant for use as a test bed for servers.

I'm not sure why, but the performance of Windows Virtual PC is just plain awful. It's just not a very good tool for virtualization. Every other established product is better.

mxcolin said:

I can't face getting VMWare.

What's wrong with VMWare? Seriously, I use ESX and ESXi at work in production and DEV/QA and it's superb. On my laptop and home machines, I have used VMWare Server 2.0 and now use VMWare Player 3.0 and they are all fantastic products.

I will also second the suggestions to go bridged on the network adapter. NAT is fine if you simply need to gain Internet access from the VM. But if for any reason you need to actually access and transfer files through the local network....going bridged is a far better idea.

By bridged do you mean select the actual network card rather than Shared network? If so then I already have bridged selected.


The behaviour is extremely strange. Take the example of copying a 20MB file.

• Copying from the guest to the host from a network share (on the host machine) is instant
• Copying from the host to the guest from a network share (on the guest machine) is around 12 minutes
• Copying from the host to the guest from the from the TS shared drives (on the guest machine) is instant

This can't be a performance thing that can be tweaked this is just plain broken, there is something not right with this.

I use Virtual PC because my work's infrastructure is built around Virtual Server/Hyper V/Virtual PC and until this we've never had one single problem with it.

I'm having a similar problem

I'm running windows 7 as the host machine and winows xp as a guest machine on vmware server 1.10.

The connection is bridged and when I transfer files between the host and guest, it gets very slow. At a rate of about 30 kb /s, it takes hours for a large file.

However, when I transfer files between my host and another physical computer on the network, it takes minutes. Also transfers from that outside computer to my guest have been that fast as well.

My temporary fix right now is transferring files from my host to an outside computer and then to my guest from that outside computer. This is not ideal and I'm hoping to figure out how to fix this. Any help would be appreciated.

I have seen exact same thing with windows 7 XP Mode. Transfers from Host to VM Share are 18 kbps. Transfers from inside of VM from host Share are 18 kbps. Transfers from another computer on the network are fine. This did not occur in older versions of Virtual PC on XP. Either there is bug in Windows 7 or Antivirus is freaking it out. Very annoying.

While XPMode - VM is running Click on Tools, Settings, Integration Features, Drives and check them all. Now my Host Drives shows up in windows explorer in the VM and File Transfer is fast. :)