As a testing environment, I have set up a vmware virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2. I have Apache and PHP installed (as part of the xampp package). I am doing the development outside of the VM, and so want Apache to serve PHP files from a VM shared folder (which appears as a network share in the VM). I have done this by creating an NTFS symbolic link in Apache's htdocs directory. I can access this directory from the browser, and plain-text files are readable. However, PHP fails to process files, instead returning the following error:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required 'C:/xampplite/htdocs/path/to/file.php' (include_path='.;C:\xampplite\php\PEAR') in Unknown on line 0

It appears to be a permissions issue — PHP doesn't seem to be allowed to read the file to process it. However, Apache has no problem opening files in the directory. I cannot figure out how to give PHP the necessary permissions to process the file. Does anybody know of a way to make this work, or else another solution for getting the files into the VM automatically while I develop on the host machine?