Online/Offline Backups in Virtual Server 2005

Anyone still using Virtual Server 2005? It's still useful software, particularly for testing and dev, but we still have a lot of production boxes out there running it too. This tidbit was gleaned from some posts I read about using Data Protection Manager, but works just fine if you are using a script or whatever to invoke the Virtual Server 2005 VSS Writer to do backups of your virtual machines. If, for whatever reason, you just can't get the backups to run online, use this registry key to simply force the writer to save state on the VM so that the VSS snapshot can be done:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Virtual Server\1.0\Backup\BackupType
Name: #VM NAME# (The friendly name of your virtual machine)
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0x1

Next time you run your backup utility or script, without explicitly telling the VM, it will save its state just long enough for the VSS snapshot to occur, then wake up the VM for you on its own.