Can't understand ESXi

[PiKe]

I understand the point of virtualization is so that you can easily move things around without the hardware restrictions you would otherwise have with bare metal, but what is the point of using VMware on HP Microservers that are primarily used at home as a NAS and/or media server?

So far I have seen that you can install ESXi o to a USB key and then have the entire zfs pool available, do you just simply locate that virtual machine on this pool or are they held on the USB key as well?

Why is it better to not have all of the machines resources available to one machine?

 

[PiKe]

I did some more reading into virtualising storage for ESXi through FreeNAS and using direct i/o, I undersatnd the main reason for doing it like this is redundancy and protection against corruption, but is ZFS really better than having a hardware RAID solution? The page I was reading last night actually suggested flashing an LSI sas card to IT mode so you can just use JBOD and have FreeNAS deal with the ZFS and fault tolerance?

Is it not akin to reinventing the wheel?