User`s guide

Managing Services and Processes 127
Main Operations on Services and
Processes
The ability to monitor and control processes and services in your system is essential because of
the profound influence they have on the operation and performance of your whole system. The
more you know about what each process or service is up to, the easier it will be to pinpoint and
solve problems when they creep in.
The most common tasks associated with managing services running on the Parallels server or
inside a virtual machine and Container are starting, stopping, enabling, and disabling a service.
For example, you might need to start a service in order to use certain server-based applications,
or you might need to stop or pause a service in order to perform testing or to troubleshoot a
problem.
For xinetd-dependent services, you do not start and stop but enable and disable services. The
services enabled in this way are started and stopped on the basis of the corresponding state of
the xinetd daemon. Disabled services are not started whatever the xinetd state.
In Parallels Server Bare Metal, you can manage services on the Parallels server and inside
Containers by means of special Linux command-line utilities. You can do it either locally or
from any server connected on the network.
As for processes, such Parallels Server Bare Metal utilities as vzps, vztop, vzpid enable
you to see what a process is doing and to control it. Sometimes, your system may experience
problems such as slowness or instability, and using these utilities can help you improve your
ability to track down the causes. It goes without saying that in Parallels Server Bare Metal you
can perform all those operations on processes you can do in a normal system, for example, kill a
process by sending a terminate signal to it.