Hotfix for VS2005R2SP1 on AMD hardware virtualization systems

I have heard from a couple of people who have hit this issue - so I thought I should make a post about it. If you attempt to run Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 on an AMD system with hardware virtualization - you are likely to see a large number of blue screens. The reason for this is that the x64 versions of Windows guard a number of privileged system registers that have been used maliciously in the past - and cause a system crash if someone tries to fiddle with them. As it turns out they are guarding a register that we need to modify for completely legitimate reasons.

To get around this there is a hotfix that you need to install on Windows first. This hotfix is available from the Virtual Server beta download page at: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=151&DownloadID=3045

This hotfix applies to both the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

Cheers,
Ben