Suspending and Pausing a 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 dialog 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.
• Click the Suspend button in the toolbar .

Note: You can view the configuration of a suspended virtual machine in the read-only mode. To modify the configuration, you need first to stop the virtual machine.

To resume a suspended virtual machine, click the Resume button in the 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 Parallels server and its applications or by other virtual machines running on the Parallels server.

Note: Only the amount of RAM used by the guest OS is released. The memory used by the Parallels Server application remains locked.

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

• Click the Pause button in the toolbar .
• 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 toolbar or choose Resume from the Virtual Machine menu.

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