Guest Suspend Questions

A

ajay

Hunter
Not being really famiiar with vm, I am moved to ask the following:

I run WinXP as a guest OS under Mac OS X 10.4.6

Suspending WinXP takes approximately 40 seconds. Is this a normal time frame?
Resuming from suspend takes one full minute. Is this normal?
I ask because the literature states suspend is supposed to be immediate. Not trying to be picky but I don't know the answers.

Next is whether or not it's okay to suspend for the longer term (1, 2, 3 days or more) or is suspend only designed for the short term.

If I"m in the suspend mode and I restart OS X, what happens to the suspended vm?

Sorry for all the questions. Any advices will be greatly appreciated.
 
ajay said:
Suspending WinXP takes approximately 40 seconds. Is this a normal time frame?
Resuming from suspend takes one full minute. Is this normal?
Click to expand...
Yes. Suspending of a VM is not the same as a laptop pc's hardware "suspend" modes. It saves the entire VM state to files on your harddisk, which takes some time.
Next is whether or not it's okay to suspend for the longer term (1, 2, 3 days or more) or is suspend only designed for the short term.
Click to expand...
As everything is on disk, there's no limit how long you can suspend. Days, months, years...
If I"m in the suspend mode and I restart OS X, what happens to the suspended vm?
Click to expand...
Nothing happens to it. Whenever you later choose, you can resume the VM. Of course, only as long as you haven't deleted the files that contain the saved VM state (vmname.sav).
 
ajay said:
Suspending WinXP takes approximately 40 seconds. Is this a normal time frame?
Resuming from suspend takes one full minute. Is this normal?
I ask because the literature states suspend is supposed to be immediate. Not trying to be picky but I don't know the answers.
Click to expand...

I think the "Suspend" in Parallels equates better to the "Hibernate" option available on some Windows laptops like the Compaq I use at work. While I'm not familiar with the details, the Hibernate option appears to save the system state to the Hard Disk and puts the laptop in a "deep sleep." This conserves more battery power. I have been unpleasantly surprised on a couple of occasions to start my laptop I had left in "Stand By" mode and find that the battery was dead and I lost the state of my last session!
 
Yes, "Suspend" is actually saving all your VM's memory to disk, which can take a while if you've set it up to use lots of memory.
 
Interesting observation. Suspend used to take forever on my 2.0 Ghz MBP w/ 1 gig of RAM. I just upgraded to 2 GB of RAM and it suspends/resumes in about 5-7 seconds. I wondered why and watched memory usage during the suspend/resume. It appears that suspend duplicates the used ram in available ram, meaning I was running the virtual machine w/ 412 MB ram and according to activity monitor in OS X I had 700 MB or RAM free. During the 5 seconds the VM was suspending my free RAM quickly dropped from 700 to about 300 MB. As soon as the suspend was done I got all my RAM freed back to 700 MB free. It seems that the speed of suspend is a factor of how much physical RAM is installed in your machine.

Just an FYI

dave
 
suspend, hibernate or shutdown?

I would like to know how people manage pausing and resuming windows xp sessions. I am using Parallels because it saves an OSX shutdown and reboot in windows and then a shutdown and reboot into OSX. Its success is found in time savings and convenience. However, I still find myself booting windows every time and shutting down every time.

Do you have success with the Parallels Suspend and XP Pro SP2? Windows sleep or hibernate?

It sppears to me that full shutdown and boot are much faster than the suspendVM command. I am just hoping that there may be a way to sleep the VM to improve speed.


Thank you,

fellow
 
Last edited:
I've been suspending my XP SP2 sessions constantly since I started using parallels with no huge problems. Saves quite a bit of time
 
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