@TS79 In your backup/replication notes you say that remote to remote backup replication doesn't put any load on the pools, except that it does? The XO VM is doing the heavy lifting and will use CPU and Network resources, provided by the pool, to accomplish the replication. There are no "agent" like service running ON the remote that can offload the transfer.
If you haven't locked in your production storage, and have <25ms latency between your sites, consider PureStorage Flash Array //X. We use these for production storage (and backups on //E arrays)... Long story short, if you deploy a PureStorage Flash Array into both sites, you can set them up in ActiveCluster, like we have done. You can then split your production cluster between the two sites. Hosts in both sites have paths to storage on each side, but use the array closest to them - the arrays then replicate the writes between themselves. It's truly active-active synchronous replication. This allows a design where the failover between sites is automated. If one of the sites goes down, the workloads will automatically restart in the other site. There's a lot of network design that goes into this, but it's definitely possible as we're doing it.