You can use Samba shares (win<->nix) or NFS (nix<->*nix) if you don't have Vagrant, or whatever it is :) That being said - don't! As others said, X protocol is

You can use Samba shares (win<->nix) or NFS (nix<->*nix) if you don't have Vagrant, or whatever it is :) That being said - don't! As others said, X protocol is network transparent, let's you display windows on a server from everywhere. That means you can open a GUI tool on VM and see it's window(s) on your desktop, with your window manager decorations and basically indistinguishable from an app on your main system. It's possible on Windows thanks to xming (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/) which is a lightweight X server for Windows.