It’s nice to see Workstation 6.0 being received well. We continue to focus on performance improvements for this product, not just the major subsystems but every feature we support too. One of the significant improvements I’d like to draw your attention to is in using Shared Folders. Shared Folders allow sharing files between the guest and the host, or among virtual machines.
We’ve now wired up this feature with the guests’ kernel (page) cache. What this means is that your files in the shared folder will now be cached by the guest kernel for faster reads. Writes are done asynchronously, making them faster as well. The attributes (or metadata) of the files are cached, making browsing through your Shared Folder for all your files much quicker. This support is for Linux guests at the moment. With this integration you can expect improvements in performance up to 40%, depending on the usage.
We’ve always received great feedback on the usefulness of this feature, and we hope you continue to enjoy your experience in using Shared folders even more. We are looking into similar improvements for Windows guests as well.
Happy browsing.