Some advice on what's required

Im a Bit confused so any help would be appreciated.

I investigating using Acronis to deliver as close to real time disaster recovery as possible. I was hoping someone could just confirm I am on the right track with what Acronis tools are required to do this.

We provide off site back solutions at a file level. We want to offer it at a volume level.

Scenario
Customers server requires maximum uptime and a fail over capability for their DR planning
Data loss exposure minimized to 1 hour. (1 hour incrementals)

Recovery options to include:
a) offsite Virtual machine failover
b) bare metal recovery to new server

Testing Acronis
I have deployed Backup and Recovery 11.
The platform is Windows Server 2008R2 (foundation) 64bit - NOT virtual.
The virtual machine system we have is running current ESX platform (free)

I have performed a volume backup of the system volume for the 2008R2 server purely for testing how the applications work.

I comprehend that the output of this kind of backup is suitable for recovery to either a VMware platform or to a bare metal system using the Universal Restore tools.

This method would result in a major volume file plus smaller incrementals. They would probably be backed up to a local disk and then backed up remotely to the location where the VMware platform it. The idea being that it would be possible to move that backup onto a VMware platform and then launch the backed up server in a VM.

In reading the installation guide I can see there are maybe a couple of ways to create these volume backups and that it might be possible to do one straight to a VMware platform including regular incrementals which would some how be combined to form a new current and functioning VM image that is always ready to launch.

We are assuming that either way the backup could be migrated to bare metal server once a replacement has been sourced.

My question is, does the Backup and Reccovery package with the Univeral Restore tools do both scenarios that I have described or does the second option of writing the backed up volume directly to a VMware platform require different things including the type of VMwae platform we are testing with?

I believe it does but I don't know the specifics of whats required.

Any pointers or corrections to what we are thinking would be much appreciated.
Thanks