Just have a question about ‘hot’ or ‘live’ backups.
Firstly some background... we have 3 esx hosts which were originally meant to be connected to a san, then our budget got cut for the next 6-12 months (hosts were bought before the san), so now we have 3 hosts each with local storage (sas drives on raid 5) on which to place our virtual environment *cry*

We now have a directive to only use esx (not hyper v or vmware server), so I am wondering how do I go about backing up said hosts on local storage to another location?
vcb cannot be used as there is no san and the powers that be want a backup of the vm image, that has left me with veeam backup and vranger as the candidates (naturally my question is about veeam).
I have been testing the image level backup and restore which works a treat however, I am wondering how in the hell do I take a image level backup of a running vm (server 03 and 08) without the vm thinking that it was a dirty power off?
Currently if I do a image level backup of a running vm and then restore it to another location, the vm boots and windows asks if you would like to start normally, use safe mode or use the last known good configuration just as it would if I had powered it off and not shut it down cleanly.
Snapshots can restore to a running state if the vm is powered off why cant veeam backup or can it and I'm just stupid? Can I set it to somehow take a snapshot then take a image level backup, which can then both be restored to a location?
My understanding of hot backups means you can take an image level backup of a running vm and then restore that vm in its running state to another location? Is that correct or am I way off the mark?
Anyway thanks in advance for any help and/or advice.
Cheers
