We have 3 hosts running ESXi 5, two for testing environments and one with a few production servers and apps (nothing critical). I only backup the VM's on the app server and I have to do it manually ...

A bit of background: I work for a small financial institution which is just starting to try out virtualization. ESXi becoming free couldn't have better timing. High-availability doesn't matter too ...

Technically, backing up virtual servers running on VMware ESX and Infrastructure server should be simple, given that they’re just disk images, not actual disks. In practice, however, it’s not quite so ...