Stuck with Windows Server Shutting Down? Check Hyper-V Issues.

Okay, so picture this: I was all set to shut down my Windows Server, you know, the usual drill. But then, bam! It got stuck. Like, totally frozen while trying to shut down the Hyper-V. I was like, “What the heck?” I even tried to force it to shut down using `shutdown /i` in the command prompt, but no luck. Just got a “permission denied” message. I’m starting to think this might be the root of the problem with Hyper-V.

So, I manually shut down both of my virtual machines. I can still connect to them using Hyper-V Manager on the host and everything. I tried shutting them down from there, but even after an hour, nothing happened.

Digging Deeper

Turns out, there’s some weird issue with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019, and maybe even on 2016. It just can’t seem to shut down the virtual machines properly.

Trying Different Things

• I tried disabling and then enabling the network adapters inside the VMs. I heard somewhere that this could be due to some messed up permissions for the virtualization service account.
• Checked for any scheduled tasks that might be messing with the shutdown process, but found nothing.
• I even checked if my virtual hard disks were running low on space, ’cause I read that can make VMs unresponsive. Also made sure the disk controllers were set up right.

And get this, I recently updated this Windows Server 2019 box that I use as a Hyper-V hypervisor. Right after the update, this whole mess started.

I found out that there’s a service called “Hyper-V guest shutdown service.” It’s supposed to let the Hyper-V host tell the VM to shut down. But it looks like the host can always force a shutdown, which isn’t ideal.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at. It’s a real head-scratcher. I really need to deal with this whole Hyper-V mess. I’ll keep you guys posted if I find anything that works.