>If I run the VFP app on the file server, with drive substitutions to create drive letters expected by the program, it flies. On either box, once the tables are considered ‘local’ the performance is a ten-fold improvement.

I assume in the above you meant "On either VM..."

If that's the case I think you've narrowed it down to being a virtual network performance issue. If so, addressing that means looking at 2 things:

- configuration of the VMWare virtual network
- configuration of the Windows network that runs on top of the virtual infrastructure

I haven't used VMWare hypervisors or VMMs so I can't help you with the details of that. Very generally, you'd want to make sure virtual adapters run full duplex, that they aren't being bandwidth-throttled by default, and that any virtual router/firewall isn't doing anything intense like deep packet inspection.

Then, with the Windows networking that runs on top of the VMWare virtual network infrastructure, you'll need to look into all the things you would need to configure properly with a physical Windows network. Active Directory/DNS/WINS, primary and backup domain controllers, ensuring there are no master network browser issues etc.

Finally, two W2K8 VMs talking to each other will by default use SMB2. There is a known bug that causes corruption with file-server databases such as VFP and MS Access when using SMB2. For reliability, at least, you'll want to disable SMB2 on at least the file server VM so it forces fallback to the earlier SMB(1).