Tahoe,
Question about using ESX:
With using Esx, don't you have to pay for each machine it is hosted on? That was the only reason I never used ESX for backoffice machines and went with creating a base image with sysprep that will install on any hardware. ESX made sense to have a VM for a manager to use for whatever, and then the Aloha backoffice machine, but the cost of ESX was prohibitive.
-SG