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Your response to Ed's reply leaves me even more confused than your original question. I've had to protect countless numbers of systems over the years, and from what I'm hearing you say, I think it might be best to take a step back, and ask yourself what you are really trying to do. In short, the collective objectives of all Administrators is to protect and preserve the integrity of:
1. The data (structured, unstructured, etc.)
2. The system that serves up the data.
I also think you might be making some unfair assumptions about snapshots. Most of the 3rd party apps metioned, along with other SAN based solutions like EqualLogic leverage vcenter's API to make a hypervisor consistent snap, but that snap then is independendant from the VM itself, so you don't have any journaling going on, or old snapshots laying around, which is the reason for growth.
Remember, it's about "protection" not just backing up files on a guest OS. Confusion might occur when you apply the older paradigm of protection of systems in the physical realm. The desired result is the same, but the capabilities of the physical realm never allowed for such a thing. My position is that file level backups of OS's never worked in the first place, which is why one ended up with bare metal disk imaging solutions. This seemed like magic until virtualization came along.
I'm actually quite a stickler about #2. Anybody trying to rebuild a Sharepoint Server, Exchange Server, CRM Server, etc. just from database backups knows what I'm talking about here. ...but if you can protect the system that serve up the data in their totality (hypervisor consistent mechanisms to protect the system), you are covered. My testing, and real recovery scenarios have proven that to be the case.