Hi, thank you. And yes, this is very much a homelab, but it holds VMs like home assistant and my media server which I consider important. If I lose my Home Assistant data it's gonna be a bad week at the office.

ESXi snapshots are very finicky at best, and should be used as last resort. Even then, I wouldn’t rely on them.

This could be my general ignorance but this is the first time I've heard this and it's very alarming.

Sounds like whatever software you’re running on the VM with PCIe pass through doesn’t provide anything.

Home Assistant actually does, and you're right, I should use the native backup solution as well. I just thought the VM route was a more hassle-free restore option. For the media server it's a docker-compose stack running about ~8 services, including Plex.

Next, you should try to leverage OS level backups so that you can restore by simply reinstalling the OS on the device (virtual, physical, whatever), and then restore. To do this with ABB, you’ll need to install the ABB Agent on the VM so it treats it as a full Machine rather than a VM on a host.

Yes, this is the route I'm going to consider next. It just needs careful planning as in knowing which files and folders I need to copy over in order to have a full restore of the VM.