There are two types of Hyper-V checkpoints, production, and standard checkpoints. You can think of a production checkpoint as being akin to creating a data consistent backup using a backup solution as it uses Volume Shadow Copy service (VSS). Most modern backup solutions flush any pending I/Os in memory to disk, ensuring data consistency of the data on disk. A production Hyper-V checkpoint is much the same. When you create a production checkpoint, the VM is quiesced and prepared for data consistency on the disk of the virtual machine. A production checkpoint does not capture memory contents. If you restore your Hyper-V virtual machine using a production checkpoint, the virtual machine will be in the powered-off state. Standard checkpoints include memory contents and will capture the power and memory state of a virtual machine.