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Why is my virtual machine "Paused-Critical"? [Hyper-V]

  • Artigo

Virtual machines will go into the “Paused-Critical” state under Hyper-V if we detect that we are going to run out of space for the virtual hard disks.  If we were to run out of space for expanding a dynamic or differencing virtual hard disk – we would start failing disk write operations inside the virtual machine.  The result would most likely be that the guest operating system would crash.

To avoid this problem we periodically poll the storage that is being used for the virtual hard disks.  If the free space falls under 2 gigabyte we will start to log warning messages in the event log.  If the free space falls under 200 megabyte we will pause the virtual machine and mark it as “Paused-Critical”.

One thing that often trips people up is if they have their virtual hard disks configured on one drive – but have left their snapshot files stored on the system drive.  Once a virtual machine snapshot has been taken – the base virtual hard disk stops expanding and the snapshot file stores new data that is written to the disk – so it is critical that there is enough space in the snapshot storage location.

One final note to make – due to a bug in the current version of Hyper-V – it will file warning messages and place the virtual machine into paused-critical even if the virtual machine is using fixed size virtual hard disks, and the drive that is storing the disk runs out of space for some other reason.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2010
    You saved the day. I came in to the office and my hyper-v was telling me it was paused-critical and nothing was helping. I feed up some disk space, and voila it did the trick! Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2012
    I still had 104GB free on the host and inside the VM I still had 74GB free.. I don't understand. I did see somewhere that the VSS ran out of space at 74GB. I guess this was the problem.. I made that smaller and hope it won't come back now.

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2013
    We are seeing our VMs getting paused, with the warning that the host is out of disk space. But, our host has over 750GB of free space on the drive that has the VMs and snapshots, and over 100 GB free on the OS drive. Have you ever seen that?

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2014
    I think you have to check physical space on your hard drive.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2014
    Perfect Shot, friends... my hard driver's full!! Tnks!!!!

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2015
    Thanks given information solved my problem.....

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2016
    Thank you a lot.

    • Anonymous
      July 09, 2017
      Hello All,Can somebody help me following two queries:1> According to this web page, if the free space on drive became less than 200MB then Hyper-V will pause that VM. But in my environment, I have left with 186MB but still VM is running. Then what is minimum value of free space after which Hyper-V will pause the VM????????2> What is the exact time interval after which Hyper-V poll the drive to check whether free space is less than a particular amount.???