There's a couple different ways you could set this up and streamline it a bit.
For starters, have you looked at Veeam (or anything similar)? Great product. It performs image level backups with MPIT recovery so instead of just backing up bits and pieces of data it grabs the whole VM. So, you wouldn't have to necessarily backup the .vmdk's separately. Everything you need to do a full restore is right there in the backup set. I can delete an entire VM from disk and completely restore it in less than 5-10 minutes by just running a restore job. No rebuilding VM's and then restoring data. It's all done in one shot.
It also supports application specific data recovery for SQL, Exchange, ADDS, Sharepoint, etc, so I don't have to restore an entire VM just to recover a single file/object/database. If someone deletes a SQL database I can recover just that database. Same for Active Directory objects.
Replication is also built in so you can replicate your backup sets offsite. You can even backup to tape if you want to use tape to satisfy the 3-2-1 rule. It's really a powerful product that is very flexible and the best part is that you're not over-stressing your environment or VM's as you can give it direct access to your SAN. The VM's don't really need to do anything, nor do they need an agent installed on them.
There's also vSphere Data Protection, but I don't have any experience with it. I started using Veeam bc at one point there wasn't a good backup method available from VMware.
We use Veeam for daily/monthly backups, and vSphere Replication for replicating our VM's to our co-location which consists of a small, separate vSphere environment and additional IP storage.