Nope the agent contains what it needs to protect its data, as you can use the agent standalone. If using VBR to manage and you want to send backups to VBR, then you need to deploy a backup repository

I am too slow

Yes, indeed. No proxy with agents.

This for sure 

The only time a proxy is needed for the agent is if leveraging the backup from storage snapshots feature.

Another great point which we tend not to think of. 

Good shout, not had to do this so I didn’t think of it! Thanks @haslund 

It can be helpful if you seperate your backup traffic or have dedicated repositories for “VMware” and “Agents/Enterprise Plugins”..

For example we use storage integration and the “normal” backup traffic from VMware goes through FC. The Agent backups (mainly SQL Failover Clusters) using other proxies to keep the dataflow to our backup enviornment in our DataCenter design..

But in general dedicated proxies for Agent backups are not needed ;-)

daniel