How to fix 19050: The virtual machine is not in a valid state to perform the operation

Backups may fail with one or more of the following error IDs: 19050, 32022, 32032, 32056, 32315, 32546 and 33680

and example messages are shown below:

Hyper-V-VMMS 19050 '' failed to perform the operation. The virtual machine is not in a valid state to perform the operation.

'<VM Name>' failed to perform the operation. The virtual machine is not in a valid state to perform the operation.

The virtual machine '<VM Name>' cannot start a backup operation because it is currently executing a conflicting operation. Try the backup again

Some reasons why the above errors occur have been confirmed by Microsoft (see here) and include:

• an active Hyper-V replication was in operation when the backup was initiated
• a VM checkpoint / snapshot merge operation was active when a backup was requested

How to Fix the Error

These errors are basically transient. Once the VM status goes back to normal you can run a backup again.

I.e., try to run backups at a time when replication is off. Also it’s recommended not to  delete checkpoints when a backup is about to start.