Hyper-V: Paused-Critical Virtual Machine State

I was facing an issue where vm guest are paused with the following “Paused-Critical Virtual Machine State” message. Each attempt to resume the guest, end in them being  pause once again.

This happens when the host volume is running low on available disk space.

Here are some actions you can take to help with this:

Expand the volume storage: If you are using iSCSI attached storage this may be simple to do, however fixed storage introduces complications as you may need to forklift the data or possibly migrate to a larger storage volume.

Clean up the volume: Delete unused vm guests, snapshots, and templates stored on the volume

Compact Disks: Start compacting guest machine disks.