Vmware Consildated Backup is designed to use a base image and then differencial snapshots. Keeping only the differences or changes made since the disk was created. It works with the storage engine directly and not the virtual machine itself, in a supported enviroment with snapshot hardware this means seamless backups and the ability to revert a machine back to a previous snapshot very quickly but it this approach does have draw backs compared to a regular client server backup model.
The client cannot yet restore their own files, and individual files cannot be restored, only images and snapshots can be reverted to.
patching, imaging ( installations ) Coming soon.
Hardware upgrades are quite limited in the virtual world, the choice is not huge and the limitations are real however no hands on work is required.
Most hardware changes can only be applied when the machine is powered off, this makes sense as a virtual machine would get just as upset about losing its hard disk while running as its physical equivelant.
Dvd / CD and Floppy drives can be used with the onboard VM hosts CD/DVD/Floppy or an image file such as a CD.iso / DVD.iso or floppy.img.
This is a virtualisation standard that makes things easy to manage and simple to use, a tip here is to create a large datastore from low cost SATA storage, possibly exported by NFS to ESX. This is a cheap way to utilise almost exclusively read only data at a low cost per GB.
Your existing cloning or image applications will probably also work well inside the virtual enviroment, but they are not really the right tools for the virtual age. Inside ESX there is a templating and customisation possibility. This enables you to take a machine and clone it , the source machine could be either physical to virtual and the resulting template image can be customised with details like hostnames , ip numbers or DHCP on, dns suffixes and so on.
In practice however, cloning from a template and customising works better on supported versions of Windows , in particular I have tested XP desktops and 2003 Server templates and customisations and they have worked really well.
Unfortunately the Linux side of things is a little less supported with 64 bit OS's being completely off the map right now. This is a slight annoyance, but I can simply clone a virtual or physical machine straight into ESX and customise it myself in seconds or with a script.
