Hi Chris,  Paravirtual SCSI controller was added to the XMS in our latest release to improve performance. However, this should have no impact on the XMS recovery process. In the worse case, if the XMS has to be recovered (if there was a failure) - we always keep the configuration backed up on the array itself. This was true before version 3.0 came out, and is true now.  You do not need to use image level backup tools (like Avamar) to backup the XMS. It seems you use Avamar to backup all your VMs (including the XMS) - you can exclude the virtual XMS from your backup. We do not recommend backing up the virtual XMS using external tools - there is no added benefit that you get out of it.  Hope this helps.
In 3.0 and later, the XMS virtual appliance uses a Paravirtual SCSI controller and an 837GB thin provisioned disk. We use EMC Avamar for data protection and leverage VM image level backups for all VMware VMs. Our prior XMS came up through the ranks beginning with 2.2 so it did not have a PVSCSI adapter. Now, of course, we cannot use image-level backups to backup the XMS, since Hot-Add doesn't support PVSCSI. I haven't seen anything in the communities about this, and I suspect that traditional VMs with PVSCSI disks would be protected with in-guest agents. Does anyone know how EMC suggests protecting the XMS?  I've also created an SR to ask directly, but as it is an S3, I'm expecting a decent delay in processing.  Thanks, Chris
How do you protect the virtual XMS in 3.0 and later?