I work for the company that developed esXpress and I just wanted to mention that in our new version that Erik is working with esXpress now does File Level Backups. What we do is at the same time we create the image backup we will create a seperate backup archive for the folders/files you defined to us to for file level backups. With the seperate archive on a restore you don't have to go to the image backup, you have the file level backups seperately.

Pete@esxpress

The best thing for you would be to evaluate the different solutions to determine what works best for you.

pete@esxpress

I am not using separate NICs. Backups take place at night, when my servers are pretty much idle. The neat thing about esXpress is, that you actually CAN use separate NICs, and also that you can throttle the transfers. You can even specify to throttle only during business hours (and go full bandwidth outside of that window). If bandwidth is your problem, you might consider to backup to VMFS. No network loaded there.

I do see service console activity when backups run. It is not anything really shocking though. And even if there is a lot of activity, the service console is always restricted to CORE0, and you can manage the number of VBA (backup appliances) you run on each host. So your ESX hosts should do fine. Load more, get more... Because esXpress runs on each host, load is nicely spread throughout your environment. That is how they manage to get these wildly high backup rates. Divide and conquer

All this stuff available in esXpress... And no, I don't work for them. Just charmed by the product