I spent the last hour trying to setup an IIS7 website running from a VMware Fusion shared folder. Specs:

• VMware Fusion 3.1.2
• MacBook Pro OSX 10.6 Host
• Win7 Guest
• IIS 7.0 something

I want to edit the website from OSX, so I added the directory as a shared folder. I tried various things to get IIS to recognize the directory including using symlinks and mapping the drive. I read an article that mentioned using the UNC directly, so I tried that and things seemed to work until I loaded the site and got a 500.19 error, “The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.”

I tried some different tactics involving changing permissions and messing with the identities that the app pool and website run under, with no luck.

Frustrated, I finally tried some more targeted searching about my particular scenario and came upon two more articles on the VMware forums. These recent posts seem to suggest that it’s not possible to do what I want in the way I want right now.

It seems I’m left with two options:

• Edit files in the guest OS
• Setup some synchronization between the guest and host directories