So to get around all the sharing problems I am having, I am installing another copy of Parallels on my Mac Mini Server and running a copy of Windows 7 there to act as a file server for Revit. Nothing special there. However, the drive I would like to share with my other VMs is a FW800 drive. I have successfully assigned a USB drive to the "Server" VM and shared that, but when I use SmartMount to access the external FW drive from the VM I loose the ability to then share any folders on that drive. Am I stuck with USB performance here? Now, currently the FW drive is formatted for HFS+, but SmartMount makes it accessible in Windows. Do I need to format it in NTFS to then share it?
Also, if an external FW drive isn't an option, can an internal drive be configured for dedicated access by the VM, and that shared? I have a single drive in the MacMini, but I could add another drive for better performance, as long as it can then be configured as a shared drive on the VM and accessed from another VM running on a different Mac.
And I guess the other option would be to give the machine a massive virtual drive that lives on the FW800 drive. Is there a performance hit for having really big virtual drives? On the order of 500 GB or so? From the looks of it the virtual drive can't be separated from the virtual machine, so no way to have one virtual drive (the "OS" drive) on the internal hard drive, and then another "Data" drive on the external? UNless Parallels will let me use a DMG? Hmmm....
Any help is greatly appreciated! Getting some sort of viable sharing going is really urgent.
Gordon
Last edited: May 16, 2012
