Is the tape device fiber/san attached? If so you can connect it to the VCB proxy and use SLP to duplicate it to tape. Make sure that the VCB proxy stays on the same ESX host, if it moves it will lose the tape drive. Or you can duplicate it to a media server with tape attached over ethernet.
I'm not using hotadd, but have considered it for remote locations. Let us know how it goes.
Matt
