alright, it worked! (hopefully somebody else cares 
.) I was able to ZFS snap and replicate my vdp appliance, remount and use the copy. It actually came back up and ran a scheduled backup job! Test restore job is running now.
Tomorrow I'll go through the process clean with my second appliance, as I think I've worked it out from this test. Subsequent tests will be to restore from incremental snaps/replicas, and then too actually run through the whole thing at the remote site which will involve setting up a fresh vcenter.