FactoryTalk and Virtual Machine network folders

I am trying to set up network folders to be used with FactoryTalk software. For many years I have been able to store my 500 and 5000 programs on my host machine and open and save them from my Virtual Machine using a folder networked to my host machine. I am wondering if anyone has had success doing this with FactoryTalk. For example...a Runtime folder on your host machine shared with your virtual. The software does not seem to like it.

In my experience, Factorytalk View doesn't really like to even work as intended, so I would highly recommend throwing a wrinkle in the filesystem. With the way the application manager works, I only see lots of headaches trying to do this.

at my last plant before they moved it to another state and let me go,
I was responsible for all the plc, rsview, panelview, interface modules program storage on the plant network.

we stored everything on the plant network and gave numerous people read access. Only one other person really made major changes, I was the one who had write access.

when we needed to modify the program, we had the following procedure.
copy the file to the laptop
open the file and then save it as program name-date (today's date)
make the program modifications
go to the plc and open up the current plc program.
save the program to the pc (it's the master file) as program name and today's date.
do a file compare to make sure the programs match.
download the program you modified
debug and change the program if needed.
save the program as program name - date

the technician would then send me the program so I could put it on the network.
this worked great with only minor issues.

if your pc has the only copies of the plc program, you need to have another storage location in case your hard drive died.

james

FactoryTalk just doesn't work well with networked filesystems.

Even the Runtime file has to be decompressed and have its various files moved into the local FactoryTalk file directories to run, and FT doesn't seem to handle that gracefully when the Runtime file isn't located in the traditional local /Runtime/*.MER location.

I routinely keep my *.ACD and *.RSS files on my VM Host, but never my FactoryTalk files. At the most, I manually move my *.APA Archive files to a storage directory off the VM.

I have used the same routine as described by Ken.
Our Company recently switched from VM to VirtualBox for our FactoryTalk software and the file management is the same.

Extra steps but necessary steps