Access Denied When Deleting Hyper-V VM Files

I have a test environment setup using Hyper-V. I regularly add and remove virtual machines from this Hyper-V host. When you delete a virtual machine in the Hyper-V Management console, it does not delete the files. You need to delete the files manually afterwards.

A significant percentage of the time, I receive an Access Denied message when deleting the VM files. Even though the VM is deleted, I cannot remove the files.The happens because Hyper-V has locked the files.

To unlock the files and allow the files to be deleted you can:

• Restart the Hyper-V host
• Restart the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service on the host