Suspending and Pausing Your Virtual Machine

Starting and shutting down virtual machines may take a considerable amount of time. Instead of performing these operations, you can suspend or pause a virtual machine for the required time and quickly resume it later.

Note: Close the Virtual Machine Configuration window before changing the virtual machine state.

Suspending a Virtual Machine

Suspending a virtual machine is similar to putting a real computer into the sleep mode. When you suspend a virtual machine, you save its current state (including the state of all applications and processes running in the virtual machine) to a special file on the host computer. When the suspended virtual machine is resumed, it continues operating at the same point the virtual machine was at the time of its suspending.

Suspending your virtual machine may prove efficient if you need to restart the host computer, but do not want to:

• quit the applications running in the virtual machine
• spend much time on shutting the guest operating system down and then starting it again

To suspend a virtual machine, do one of the following:

• choose Suspend from the Virtual Machine menu or
• click the Suspend button in the Parallels Workstation Extreme toolbar.

Note: You can view the configuration of the suspended virtual machine in read-only mode. To be able to modify the suspended virtual machine configuration, you should stop the virtual machine.

To resume a suspended virtual machine, click the Resume button in the Parallels Workstation Extreme toolbar or choose Resume from the Virtual Machine menu.

Pausing a Virtual Machine

Pausing a virtual machine releases the resources, such as RAM and CPU, currently used by this virtual machine. The released resources can then be used by the host computer and its applications or by other virtual machines running on the host computer.

Note: Only the amount of RAM used by the guest OS will be released. The memory used by the Parallels Workstation Extreme application will still be locked.

To pause a virtual machine, do one of the following:

• click the Pause button in the Parallels Workstation Extreme toolbar or
• choose Pause from the Virtual Machine menu.

When a virtual machine is paused, its window is grayed out. To continue running the virtual machine, click the Resume button in the Parallels Workstation Extreme toolbar or choose Resume from the Virtual Machine menu.

Parallels Workstation Extreme is designed to operate like an ordinary computer application. This means that you do not have to change the virtual machine's state from running to paused, suspended, or stopped before putting the host computer to sleep. In sleep mode, the host computer does not allocate any resources to the running applications (including Parallels Workstation Extreme and all virtual machines) so that they are stopped automatically. As you start the host computer, all the applications are automatically up and running again.