Hyper-V Windows 2012 - How to free up disk space after Snapshot have been deleted and VM(s) have been shut down.

To reclaim the disk space that is being consumed by snapshots that were taken, after deleting the snapshot(s) in the Hyper-V Manager console you typically have to shut down the VM(s) and let the merge process complete but if after doing this the disk space hasn't been released  you must "restart the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service", which will release the space that was being used by the snapshots.