I was considering migrating the fileserver to the ESXi box and having it use its own datastore and separate drives. Is this a bad idea? With the backups for the ESXi servers on there, it kind of worries me if the SHTF.
Long story short, we needed a faster computer to replace our main RIP server. Being on a tight budget we sold off our old Dell P4 & Pentium D servers and bought a used Dual Xeon dual core 3ghz box with and virtualized the servers with ESXi 4.1. We are just using the free plan, and using internal storage (12 - 7200rpm SATA bays). The ESXi server is not being hit hard, and with 5-6 servers it idles 60% of the time.
We can keep it on the PowerEdge 850 if that's a better option. I was thinking of storing an extra copy of the VMs on the server and pointing Workstation or Fusion to those to help out in a pinch if there is a hardware failure. If I had the fileserver on the ESXi box, that would be a lot more work to recover it….am I worrying too much being it is a small shop?
We do this for large file shares/servers at my company and there are no problems at all. There are ~1000-5000 people concurrently accessing shares on the server and we experience no degradation in performance over its previous physical implementation. This is done in a vSphere ESX 4.0 (not free) environment with all the datastores/guest VMs on a SAN.