Hyper-V VM stuck on stopping

On my Windows 2012 (not R2) Standard server, I run several VMs.  In the process of trying to shut them down, I consistently find an issue where insead of shutting down, the virtual machine get stuck saying "stopping"

In this helpful thread, people say that the problem is actually Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) being on the same server as the VMs.  As such, I had luck restarting the RRAS service on the affected server.  For me, this worked.  I've tried the other suggestions of killing the process - to no avail.

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/c55f8c8b-958e-449b-95fd-05834c806580/hyperv-vm-stuck-in-stopping-state

Hyper-V virtual machine at 100% CPU inexlicably

In some cases, I've seen Hyper-V virtual machines run at 100% CPU usage.  I can't explain it - but the cause is Windows Update on the VM itself.  The fix is to disable the Windows Update service from automatic startup and stop the service.  This fixes the problem.  You'd need to install updates manually going forward.

Virtual Network Queuing causes poor performance on Dell servers

In troubleshooting some poor network card behavior on my Dell PowerEdge T420 running Windows Server 2012 with three virtual machines on it, I came across these articles that describe problems with virtual network queues enabled on Broadcom NICs.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2902166/EN-US?wa=wsignin1.0

http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/Windows_Server_2008/Q_27985670.html

I upgraded to the latest drivers and disabled the virtual machine queues.  My sample size was small and problems intermittent, so it's hard to say if I resolved the issues, but it's worth noting.

Increasing the size of Hyper-V virtual disk on Win 2008 R2

I had to increase the size of a virtual machine on a Windows 2008 R2 host.  I'd go to the settings of the VM and click on "edit" would be greyed out when attempting to edit the hard drive size.  It looked like this.

I needed to do three things to resize the disk:
1) shut down the VM
2) Delete all the snapshots of the VM
3) Let the VM merge itself to all previous snapshots - see this

It can take minutes or hours for the merge (#3 above) to take effect.

After the merge has taken place, you can increase the size of the disk and then you'll need to extend the size of the hard drive within Windows of the VM:

Snapshots taking up tons of space on VM host machines

I found myself in a situation where I had a 1 TB drive on a VM host (running Windows 2008 R2) with four virtual machines on it that was completely out of space.  I found that there were tons of AVHD files taking up a lot of room.  Per what I read, these are snapshot files, even though I deleted the snap shots from the Hyper-V Manager (and cleared up a dozen GB or so), the snapshots were not truly gone.

This page talks a little bit about the process:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charles_sterling/archive/2008/08/06/what-are-all-these-avhd-files-hyper-v.aspx?Redirected=true

But in the end, I got the space back by just turning off the virtual machines.  When I did so, there was a merge process that went on with the snapshots.  In a turned off machine, this just happens automatically.  In the end, I turned off the machines and left them off until the "cancel merge in progress" went away.  For my largest VM (approx 400 GB of storage), this took about 4 hours.

This is what the cancel merge in progress looks like:

backing up a virtual machine to a local USB hard drive

A virtual machine can't natively see USB hard drives. The USB hard drives are attached to the host OS and not visible by the virtual machine. I wondered how to get a virtual machine created in Hyper-V to see a local USB drive and I found this excellent tutorial:

http://blog.ronnypot.nl/?p=721

A summary:

In the host OS, go to disk management and take the USB drive offline (right click on it and choose offline)

Shut down the virtual machine you want the USB drive to attach to.

Open the settings for that virual machine

Go to SCSI controller -> hard drive

Under phsyical hard disk, select the USB drive, which should be visible there

Now you'll be able to see the USB drive in the virtual machine and back up to it if that's what you'd like to do.