when accessing shares from one vmware client to another on the same host (or from a client OS to the host) does the network traffic ever hit the host's physical NIC or does vmware process it all in-house?

case in point: i have xp media center running in a vmware client on my slack box. when my 360 streams video from media center is the the data crossing the physical NIC three times?

<<=== video file read from slack share
===>> media center reads and processes video
<<=== media center sends converted stream to xbox

Try running ethereal/wireshark or tcpdump on the Linux host and see if it shows traffic arriving at the NIC. If it does, then VMWare isn't doing it all in-house...

i assume i can set up a virtual private network between my slackware host and the media center client and all network traffic between them will be done internally on the pc. but i'm not sure how to force media center to read the shared files through that virtual network instead.

Funny that you ask this question as I was thinking this a few minutes ago! I also use VMware to experiment with Linux distros. In fact, I just did a network install between two virtual linux distros and I saw my router blinking so it is doing that 3-point data transfer. I also wonder if there is a way to do a virtual network connection to avoid the "middle man"

Vmware sets up a VPN using samba for sharing with the host, and it sets up another VPN for some reason or another (the shared files feature, I think). The default address ranges are 192.168.40. and 172.16.247.

You can see this by doing an ifconfig.

If you setup network with the "host-only" adaptor, it should use the loopback device. I believe the same is true for NAT networking. If you use bridged networking it will traverse your network interface.

i fear this is turning into more of a windows question then...

adding a virtual host-only adapter is easy enough to do; but that raises the question of forcing media center to read the shares off of that connection instead. any suggestions?

a "band-aid" solution would be to block media center's primary IP address in smb.conf but that's not "really" solving it, right?

I would imagine that unbinding File & Printer Sharing from the external adaptor and only having it bound on the host-only adaptor would do the trick...

ha i always skipped right to IP config from that drop down list. i'll try that. thanks.

worked like a charm (mostly).

i added a server-side host-only network adapter using vmware-config.pl and added a host-only adapter to my media center install. then i took file/printer sharing off of the "public" nic and added it to the new (host-only) nic.

BUT then my 360 extender couldn't see any shares anymore. the public network my shares are on is "cybertron" and rather than figuring out how to fix remote announce to announce on both nics (assuming that's the solution) i just added an entry to my media center hosts file pointing "cybertron" to the host-only ip.

network traffic is decreased quite a bit now. nice.

media center through my extender takes a little longer to load and vmware doesn't seem to be smart enough to activate my new host-only adapter before auto-starting media center (so i have to start the virtual os manually)

more info than anyone cared for i'm sure.