Ubuntu Vmware Server Guest Slow Network Speeds

I recently setup a test VMWare server environment on my Windows 7 workstation to run Ubuntu LAMP development environments that mirror my production environments. After I install an Ubuntu (or any Nix) environment, I typically install Samba services so I can easily copy code/images back and forth from my workstation to the development box.

I noticed on my vanilla install of Ubuntu 10.04.1LTS, that I was getting horribly network transfer speeds just copying a 13.9 MB file from my workstation to my virtual machine. It was taking between 4-6 minutes for just a 13 MB file, which is utterly ridiculous!

My VMware Server said that my guest OS had the VMware Tools installed properly, so I assumed that everything was running fine. I ran tests on the cards, tweaked Win7 settings, but nothing seemed to work. I finally figured it out by chance.

Step One:
If you’re seeing this, first uninstall everything that you did previously. Something probably got messed up! Like me, I continue to compound the issue, by trying to install the Vmware tools served up by the VmwareServer. Bad mistake.

Step two:
Go here and install follow instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools

Basically install
apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-dkms
and
apt-get install open-vm-tools

After I did that, I had to reboot and eventually got everything working properly.

My Vmware Server still happily showed that I was still running Vmware guest tools in the Ubuntu guest, but my network transfer speeds were 1000x (rough guess..) better than before. Now copying that 13.9 MB files is instantaneous.

Update 9/3/2010:
One caveat is that these tools are installed linked to your current kernel version. If you ever update your system and install a new kernel, you’ll need to rebuild your openvmware drivers again. I removed/reinstalled mine and it worked:

apt-get remove open-vm-tools
apt-get remove open-vm-dkms

REBOOT!!!

apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-dkms
apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-tools