Thanks for that. yes, I plan to set up a vSwitch on my ESX hosts and also connect the network to vcenter via a second NIC. My question is how do I configure the port group. Should it be a VM Port Group and be connected to each VM to be backed up in-band, or can it be a vkernel PG and let the API handle the VM backups at the vCenter/Host level.
If the latter, does the PG need to have vMotion enabled? Will Jumbo Frames improve performance?