Suspend vs Shutdown

[ProPenguin]

Just looking for some thoughts on when suspending is better than shutting down when it comes to server.

Thank you

[mcowger]

Suspend pauses the VM in its current state, whereas shutdown is a full true shutdown.

You might suspect if you only plan to have the VM down for a short amount of time (patching the host) and want it to come back again quickly.

[AndreTheGiant]

Note that a VM in a suspend state must be resumed on a "similar" CPU otherwise the guest OS can have some trouble.

Andre

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

With servers I definitely recommend to a clean shutdown!

Even though you may have the disk space, needed for the suspend files (.vmss) which are created to hold the current state of the VM, there's always a chance that you cannot resume the VM, if you are doing any upgrades (software or firmware) on the host system. In such a case you may need to delete the .vmss file which is comparable to pulling the power plug on a physical server. I assume that's not your preferred way to power down a server, is it?

In addition to these technical issues, you could run into logical issues e.g. open transactions, since the clients accessing the server might not wait for the server to come back online to finish the transaction, so you end up with partly done jobs (possible data mismatch).

André

[shishir08]

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

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 your VM direcotry on secondary storage.  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 your VM, but do not want to:

1)quit the applications running in the virtual machine

2)spend much time on shutting the guest operating system down and then starting it again

[schepp]

Hi,

when doing storage upgrades etc. I prefer shutting down the VMs.

But during a power loss, running too long on our UPSs I suspend them to shutdown the host servers quicker.

Regards

[iw123]

I'd be inclined to do a shutdown if it is a production VM. I only ever use suspend for testing VMs.

[ProPenguin]

After doing some testing with the suspend I believe that I agree with everyone that says they prefer shutting down.  The windows 2008 r2 servers seem to handle the suspend reasonably well but the older 2003 server had a blue screen of death.

Thanks guys