In my opinion in the 5 years I've been running enterprise vmware environments I've never really needed to worry about vmware needing vss integration.
I've NEVER relied specifically on image level backups to provide me with application level backup capabilities.
There is always a requirement for file or application level backups inside the VM...especially if you ever want to have the vendor support you.
Typically I would schedule an application level backup prior to the image level backups.
I've never really had problem with recovering a crash consistent backup, but always has an application backup available as a umm..backup.
I was mislead to believe i would not need a in guest backup agent any longer with VDR. that fault lies squarly on the shoulders of the solutions provider who sold me vmware.
that being said. the whole point of VMware is to consolidate costs, reduce your hardware needs. but what good does that do if i simply trade the costs for physical equipment for software licensing costs. to be honest i'm not sure i'm actually saving any money by moving to vmware. do i have some new flexability, sure. but the driving force behind our conversion was cost savings.
to many people only look at the technical side of this issue.
I had symantec backup exec and all the agents for my 15 physical servers, it was a version old sure, but it worked.
as soon as i made the decesion to migrate to vmware, it forced me to purchase a new backup solution that would work with vmware.
it added 15k to our costs. i'm sure in the grand scheme of things, 15k seams like nothing. but i can pretty much gurantee that's my raise for the next 5 years. now i wont get one.
bottom line, if i had just gone with hyper-v i would still of saved money on hardware and had a working backup solution for much much much less money.
