Windows server 2016 Activation stuck at 10% for over 12 hours

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dfd6273d-2baa-4ca0-b216-28e521327cfb/windows-server-2016-activation-stuck-at-10-for-over-12-hours?forum=ws2016 

 The problem each time was that the  Windows License Manager Service  was not running. By default the service is set to  Startup Type: Manual (Trigger Start) . I believe  dism.exe  is failing to trigger the service to start, thus halting the process. Simply starting this service, while  dism.exe  was stuck at 10%, resolved the issue 100% of the time. 

 I started another thread and got an answer that helped in my case: 

 I needed to press enter a couple of times in the cmd window to wake the process back up. 

 I did this after starting the services again and it then proceeded to completion!