>I was wondering if anyone has experience slowness when running applications or data access from a Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2003 or 2008 being used as a file share?
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>The application is configured to copy down and run an APP to the workstation so it is just accessing the data on the server.
>Did a simple file copy of 20 Megs from the Virtual Machine to the workstation and it was instant. The copying of the APP down to the workstation from within the startup program is very quick, but it seems as soon as the application starts to access data it slows down considerably.
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>Trying to look at things to tweak on the Virtual Machine to have the table access performance improve. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

If you have antivirus with a real-time scanning component enabled on *either* the VM or the test workstation, try disabling that for test purposes.

I can't think of anything generic to try. Can you give us more details:

- is the VM running on a different physical computer from the workstation?
- what is the VM manager? (e.g. VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V etc.)
- is it running hosted, or bare-metal?
- what is the OS in the VM? Is it Server 2003 or 2008? How many CPU cores and how much RAM is allocated to the VM hosting that OS?