Managing VM state

Hyper-V provides you with the ability to start, stop, and pause a Hyper-V VM. You can also save and restore a VM. You use the Hyper-V cmdlets to manage your VMs either locally (that is, on the Hyper-V host in a remote desktop (RDP) or PowerShell remoting session) or use RSAT tools to manage the state of VMs on remote Hyper-V hosts.

You can start and stop VMs either directly or via the task scheduler. You might want to start up a few VMs every working morning and stop them each evening. If you have provisioned your Hyper-V host with spinning disks, starting multiple VMs at once stresses the storage subsystem, especially if you are using any form of RAID on the disk drives you use to hold your virtual disks. Depending on your hardware, you can sometimes hear the IO Blender effect starting up a small VM farm. Even with solid-state disks, starting several VMs at once puts a considerable load on the Windows storage system. In such cases, you might pause a VM and let...