As I understand it if I have the Backup Exec VMware plugin/agent I can snapshot my virtual machines and have a fully packaged virtual machine completely backed up, similar to an image level backup, but it's all native to VMware. Then it also gives me the ability to do file level backups at the same time. Am I missing anything here. Any problems with esxi 4.1 embedded in this setup?
The current release of BE can use the VMware storage API to backup VMs. No limitations for ESXi.
dstavert - any idea of the minimum (vmware) licensing level necessary for this?
It uses the vStorage API for Data Protection so you need at least Essentials licensing (i.e. it won't work with a free license).