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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.
Suspending the 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 Mac. 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 Mac, 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 Desktop toolbar.
in the Parallels Desktop toolbar. You can see the progress of saving the virtual machine's state in the Suspending window.
Warning: If you edit the configuration of a suspended virtual machine, you will not be able to resume this virtual machine.
To resume a suspended virtual machine, click the Resume button 
in the Parallels Desktop 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 Desktop application will still be locked.
To pause a virtual machine, do one of the following:
- click the Pause button in the Parallels Desktop toolbar or
- choose Pause from the Virtual Machine menu.
in the Parallels Desktop toolbar or When a virtual machine is paused, its window is grayed out. To continue running the virtual machine, click the Start button 
in the Parallels Desktop toolbar or choose Resume from the Virtual Machine menu.
Parallels Desktop 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 your Mac to sleep. In sleep mode, your Mac does not allocate any resources to the running applications (including Parallels Desktop and all virtual machines) so that they are stopped automatically. As you start your Mac, all the applications are automatically up and running again.
Note: By default, you cannot suspend or pause your Boot Camp virtual machine because this may damage the Boot Camp partition. For detailed information on suspending your Boot Camp virtual machine, see Suspending a Boot Camp Virtual Machine .
