VBox/guest prevents win7 Host sleeping

[Soob]

Virtualbox 4.3.6
If a guest is running my host wont sleep when manually tasked to sleep (start->shutdown->sleep)
Screen goes blank for a few seconds then 'wakes' up, though I don't believe it ever entered sleep
powercfg /lastwake shows no wake events
powercfg wake_armed shows only USB mouse as wake enabled

Sometimes putting the guest into pause will allow host to sleep.
Otherwise suspending guest will usually allow the host to sleep.

Is there any way to automatically tell the guest to suspend?

I am not alone in this bug but googling shows no solutions.

[noteirak]

I wouldn't call it a bug, it is a necessary limitation. The guest is not aware it is being paused and that can cause some nasty situation for things like virtualization.
The feature to pause the guest is simply not available.

[IrbkOrrum]

I'd agree that it's not a bug. I'm actually rather happy that the host won't sleep when I've got VM's running.

[katmeef]

I'm using virtualbox 4.3.6 on a Fedora host and am seeing the same thing, the system will refuse to sleep or hibernate as I've configured it to do so while Virtualbox is running. Other virtualization platforms do not prevent my laptop from sleeping and it never caused any issues for my XP guest. (ie when I used OSX natively on this laptop and virtualized XP via parallels).

I view this as a bug as my laptop will now run completely out of battery instead of hibernating as I have configured it to do so. A hard power down due to a completely depleted battery would certainly would have negative effects on the virtualization environment.

[noteirak]

It's not a bug since no feature is broken, the feature is simply not available in Virtualbox. You're free to contribute the code to do it tho!

[sheldonchen]

I had no problem with win7 host sleeping but had the problem with a new win8 host and found this thread through google. I was able to fix the win8 sleeping issue with installing the virtualbox extension pack. For some reason the win8 install of virutal box didn't prompt me to install the extension pack while my old win7 install always do whenever I upgrade to a newer version of virtualbox. So check if you have the extension pack installed on your win7 host if you still having the sleeping issue.

[Pano1]

I disagree that this is not a feature. According to the manual:
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.h ... owertweaks

9.25. Handling of host power management events
Some host power management events are handled by VirtualBox. The actual behavior depends on the platform:

Host Suspends
This event is generated when the host is about to suspend, that is, the host saves the state to some non-volatile storage and powers off.
This event is currently only handled on Windows hosts and Mac OS X hosts. When this event is generated, VirtualBox will pause all running VMs.[/b]

So if the host wants to suspend, it should suspend the VMs. What is it about having a VM running that is keeping the Windows host from suspending for inactivity?