Hello Tricia,

Our snapshots/clones/replicas don't replace VCB but help augment them.  So you can still take VCB backups of the primary datastore volume say at night, but now you have a way to also keep snapshots of the VMs throughout the day for faster RPO/RTO.  Also, by using the iscsi initiator in the guest you have access to some powerful VSS snapshot capabilities for say a SQL database or Exchange mailstore.  You would still use your backup software at night to capture these but again, an additional level of scheduled protection through the day for this data.  Now this being said, a clone/snapshot/replica still has VMFS volume information so you could always offload it to a VCB proxy server and with some scripting offload the backup of these volumes.

-Will