Decided to use ESXi for my hypervisor solution.... and ran into a large amount of trouble.
The final straw occurred when my website had some serious issues... would attempt to download any php pages, would randomly fail to connect. I could restore my clonezilla image to virtualbox and the website would work, no issues (NAT'd). I could then restore the same image to ESXi and would have all sort of network issues.
I settled on Proxmox/KVM/OpenVZ for my hypervisor solution and although not as powerful it does work.