Recently I found some of my virtual machines stuck in a starting state. When I right click on the VMs that's stuck in the starting state, I only receive the following options: Connect...; Settings...; Rename... and Help. (screen shot below).
I was unable to force Shut down the VM or Stop the VM using the context menus. Even after stopping and restarting all three of the Hyper-V services,
- Hyper-V Image Management Service
- Hyper-V Networking Management Service
- Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management
the VMs are still in the stuck state and still will not stop or continue to start.
I rebooted the Hyper-V server host, and the VMs are stay in the stuck state. I took a look at the Tasks manager to see if I saw either of the services using an abnormal amount of memory or anything out of the ordinary. Nothing really stood out as being strange. But I did notice a series of services running with the name of "vmwp.exe" with the description of Virtual Machine Worker Process. About as many as I had VMs configured on the Hyper-V host. I noticed that most of the processes was consuming around 4,000k to 5,000k of Memory (Private Working Set) or more. But 6 of these processes was only using just about 500k or 600k of memory. This was the exact amount of VMs I had stuck in the starting state.
So I decided to kill one of the processes that was around 500k, and as soon as I did, one of the VMs in the starting state kicked off like it was starting for the first time showing the starting percentage indicator then the VM started and status changed to Running. I didn't get a snap shot of the processes running with low memory for a VM that was stuck in the starting state, but I have posted a snap shot of what I'm referring to below.
Weird! This is how I resolved this issue I had. So hopefully this will help someone else, if anyone else if having this issue, and if so hopefully we'll find the right solution.
Click the Image above to enlarge view.