What does suspend do?

[JoshuaBoldt]

Does the Suspend function in vSphere Client (i.e. the big yellow pause button or Ctrl-Z) just put the computer to sleep using the regular sleep function of the operating system on the virtual machine by sending the OS a command to put itself to sleep? Or does it literally pause the virtual machine at the host level by capturing its memory state to a file on the host (rather than in the OS) so that you can bring it back up exactly where you left off?

I was king of hoping that it was VMware suspending it rather than the OS suspending itself since Windows operating systems seem pretty lousy at sleeping and waking sometimes.

[bulletprooffool · Accepted solution]

Suspend, I believe, just 'pauses' the machine - writes RAM to physical disk etc to free it up.

If the VM (or th OS itself) invokes a 'sleep' function though, VMware interprets it as a 'suspend' request and will suspend the VM once the OS has gone to sleep.

[JoshuaBoldt]

Thank you. I was really hoping that was the case. I'm going to do some experimenting in View with the power policy and see how well the Power Off and Suspend options work with my VMs and stuff so now that you kind of confirmed what I thought anyway it will make it easier to research.