When a virtual machine is not in use, you should shut it down to release system resources. Stopping a virtual machine is analogous to a normal shutdown of a physical computer.
If you want to save the state of the virtual machine, you should suspend it. See Section 3.5.2.9, “Suspend Virtual Machines” for information on suspending virtual machines.
In some situations you may not be able to stop a virtual machine, for example, if you have tried to stop it while another job is in progress on the virtual machine such as a start virtual machine job. To resolve this type of situation, you should abort the job that is in progress, then kill the virtual machine. See Section 8.1.5, “Abort Jobs” for information on aborting jobs, and Section 3.5.2.8, “Kill Virtual Machines” for information on killing a virtual machine.
To stop virtual machines:
Click the Servers and VMs tab.
Select the server pool on which the virtual machines reside in the navigation tree.
Select Virtual Machines from the Perspective drop-down list. Select one or more virtual machines in the management pane, and click Stop
.
You can also shut down a virtual machine from within the virtual machine, the same way you shut down a physical computer.
After issuing the stop command, the status of the virtual machine is changed to Stopped. However, this only indicates that the command was acknowledged. There is no guarantee that the virtual machine is effectively shut down correctly. This is expected behavior since an operating system running on a physical PC may also hang during the shutdown sequence.
If the virtual machine fails to shut down, you can power it off using the kill virtual machine option, which is similar to unplugging the power cable from a physical machine. To perform a power off (kill) of virtual machines, see Section 3.5.2.8, “Kill Virtual Machines”.