Good information, everything worked as expected according to post.
A few points worth notes:
1. I restarted my virtual vCenter and after submitting backup jobs they just west into lala land ending with re-configured vSphere Data Protection. So if you ever restart your vCenter server it may be a good idea to just plan to restart your VDP box after.
2. After a good backup I noticed the failure count "1" restet to failure count "0" - not sure I like that functionality let alone understand what the purpose of the count is. Seams to work more like last job status to me!
3. After you get the configuration stable it sure apears to me - a good improvement over VDR, however I am still testing. I started one backup and while it was still running started another. Looks like the VDR process of take snapshot and mount the snapshot and back it up is still present.
4. I do think VDP backup times are much better, looking forward to seeing the results of the EMC dedupe technology on third and twentyth generation backups. First utility server (System Center) backup time 50 minutes, second time around took 1 minute. (looks to good to be true)
5. Far as I can tell even if the OS is not a supported one i.e. Server 2012, Mountain Lion, etc. VDP works fine as its just replicating the VM. Its only special configurations like Windows dynamic disk and ext4 that are current limiting factors.
Some operating systems can only start from ESXi and not vCenter however far as I can tell the VDP appliance again does not complain about it and proceeds to backup.
6. Regarding the time issue, configuring the VM to sync time from host and or have VDP and vCenter VM on the same host worked for me.
I have not worked with backed up data i.e. the VDP destination drives or the VDP client for file level restores - looking forward to it...
I have not tested the restore process.
While this may not be a practicle solution for a fortune 500 - it will sure come in handy for SMB!
7. As these are preconfigured VDP appliances I need to test making a template or other automated proccess to provision more of them quickly.
...This has been worth the two days of working with VDP!