Q & A: Why am I seeing the status of Paused-Critical on my Hyper-V VMs?

Q: I have several Hyper-V VMs that won’t start. In Hyper-V Manager they are all in the start of Paused-Critical. I can turn them off but when I restart them they just go back to the Paused-Critical state. How do I fix this?

A: The Paused-Critical state indicates that the disk storage that used by the VMs is nearly Full. When the available storage reached less than 200 MB Hyper-V pauses the VMs because dynamic disk extensions or other operations that need disk space might fail.  You need to extend the volume or move some VMs to different storage.