Why would managers suspend VMs when VDI instances are not in use?

The decision to suspend particular virtual machines (VMs) to meet changing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) needs is part of a larger philosophy of on-demand provisioning for virtualized systems.

When a business is not using a certain number of VDI instances, there is less of a need for specific allocated resources, such as CPU and memory. As a result, suspending virtual machines related to that VDI service will free up virtual resources to be used elsewhere.

This idea of on-demand functionality is central to any sort of hardware virtualization system, including systems that support virtual desktop infrastructure. A good management system will provision resources “on the fly” – it will shut down resource allocations that aren't being used, and it will adjust the different aspects of the platform to handle demand in real time.

The best services will also expand and grow systems when demand is not being met by supply. When there is digital activity that overflows the capability of the native system, the platform will move more resources into the system. A service like this may use tools like executable resizes, or change hosts, or perform other automated tasks to remedy the situation. Superior services will provide alerts and notifications of this growing demand, and stay on top of changes to the virtualized system to avoid issues like performance degradation. All of this is extremely valuable to clients who have invested in this kind of automation – the cloud and hardware virtualization remove barriers to agile management by taking much of the labor-intensive systems maintenance burden off of the companies themselves. The more automated and “on-demand” virtualized services are, the more they offer a client.