VMware or Parallels - using less resources when not in use?

Hey everyone here's my situation. I have a MacBook Air 13" but for my job I need to use websites that only work in Internet Explorer a lot. I'm trying VMware and also Parallels which both work great. My problem though is that I don't like keeping them open since it seems like they're big memory hogs and my fan gets going a lot etc so I save the state and close them. It's a huge pain though to have to wait for it to re-load every time I need to use it.

What I've been doing is using Amazon EC2 hosted platform and using Windows Server 2008 and remote desktop connection into it. This works but sometimes it's slow since it's running over the Internet of course.

Just looking for tips or thoughts on Vmware or Parallels. If I Command-H to hide it, does it use less resources? Or what do people do? Ideally I'd love to never have to shut it down so that it's always there at the ready when I need it but not if it's going to suck up memory and make my fans go. What do most people do?

It's really a matter of convenience by keeping the VM software open. However, as you found out, it sucks up resources which in turn causes the fan to spin up to overcome the generated heat. Hiding the VM makes no difference as it's still running and using resources.

Since your MBA uses an SSD it shouldn't take long to start the VM and load Windows. Anyway, that's what I would do... shut the VM down when not in use and start it up when you need to run IE.

Also, in case you're not aware, Safari can be made to emulate IE. Open Safari preferences and select to display the Developer menu. From the Developer Menu you can then choose to have Safari emulate several IE versions.

Thanks! Emulating IE doesn't work, I use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as well as some other web sites that require certain features of IE as it still won't work without it.

I noticed that when VMware is minimized like right now it shows 0.3 for CPU usage and 76mb of memory. Fans only seem to go when it's doing something like if I'm working on a large file etc but so far having it minimized seems to not really use any resources at all.

It takes maybe 20-30 secs to boot up from sleep which is okay but my issue is customers call me and I need to look things up right away. Sometimes restoring from sleep as well the network won't reconnect unless you reboot the virtual machine.