I had ruled out ESXi because I assumed it complicated things too much, my concerns were hardware compatibility and RAID.

I'll be running it on something unserver-like (either a desktop machine or something Atom based). I'm guessing that none of that will be on VMWare's ESXi compatibility list.

How does software RAID work with ESXi ? I'm guessing each guest just sees a raw chunk of disk that it has to deal with itself ? If that is the case then I'd have to deal with software RAID in each guest and I'd rather have a host OS there to do that. Or have I misunderstood how ESXi operates ?