How do i get a VM to share a local folder?
September 27, 2008 2:05 PM   Subscribe

How do I get a vmware machine to mount a folder on it's host machine?

I'm trying to emulate something we do at work on a home machine. I'm a web developer, and have a great sysadmin to work his black magic at work, and am at a loss at how to get it working at home.
At work we have VMware machines that emulate our web server enviroment on our dev machines. We run the virtual and map local.whatever.com in the hosts file to the virtual machine as a web server. The directory that holds the files for local.whatever.com is on the drive of the host machine, so we can do our development there, test in local.whatever.com, and life is good.
So, on a home machine, I've setup an ubuntu server, apache, etc. I have my router forwarding http traffic to it, it's working fine.
What i'd like it to do is: mount a folder on the home machine as the root of a site, set up apache to serve files from there. There's a setting in the vmware workstation for shared folders, but besides enabling and disabling there doesn't seem to be any useful options.
The only alternate solution I've thought of is setting up the folder inside the VM, setting up SVN on it, and just transferring from a local folder to the one inside the VM with SVN. It might be a better solution, but I'd like to at least know how to get the original plan to work. Any ideas?
env info: machine is running XP, VM is running ubuntu server, apache2, php, mysql, etc.
posted by muddylemon to Technology (3 answers total)
 
With the VM powered off or paused, go into Virtual Machine Settings ... Options ... Shared Folders. You can create one or more shared folders here, as well as enable or disable them for this VM. At least, this is how it works for a Windows guest in a Windows host.
posted by me & my monkey at 2:30 PM on September 27, 2008


To use the integrated file sharing for vmware, you'll need to install the VMware tools first. If you can't get that to work, normal filesharing (NFS or samba) would also be a good option. The ubuntu forums should have lots of information on getting the tools working.
posted by chairface at 8:15 PM on September 27, 2008


Response by poster: Sounds like i should have the workstation not the player version.
posted by muddylemon at 9:17 PM on September 28, 2008


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