VMWare agent under 12.5

Hi,

We have been successfully using the VMWare agent under BE 12.5.
We have noted however, the process used involved copying data to a staging area FIRST, then copying off to tape.

The general "gist" of my  understanding of the hotadd option would be that it avoided this requirement. In fact it seems to under competing products. However, I have hot-add VCB backups working (and we'd previously used over-the-LAN with and without SSL) and we still get the staging happening.

The major issue with this is:

* We can no longer use a VM with 32GB capacity to run our backup server. With our largest VM at 400GB, we need 400GB of space just to hold the staging
* Because staging happens first, and appears to take at least as long as writing to tape, our backups actually double in time taken. It's way quicker for us to use traditional Remote Agent style backups of VMs than to use a VMWare agent, which shouldn't be the case.

Am I doing it wrong, or am I missing something?