ESXi Lab and Plex Upgrade

[ColPanic]

I'm about to embark on a rebuild of my current server and am hoping for some tips.

Use case: ESXi Lab, Serious Plex Server, Server 2012 R2 and a few other VMs
Backup destination via site to site VPN (I have gigabit isp from Google)
Rendering client for Autodesk
Current hardware: Asrock x79 with i7-3770k, 32MB RAM
Areca 1223 RAID Card with 8x WD 3TB Red in Raid 10 (plus a couple SSDs as datastores)

What I would like to do is massively increase storage performance and capacity with freenas or napp-it and add cores and RAM. I picked up a couple of E5-2670s and an S2600Cp mobo and 128 GB RAM. I'm also thinking about picking up an M4308 chassis.
I also have an m1015 HBA in IT mode plus a SAS expender.

My plan is to build the new system and add it to Vsphere, I have one one 5tb HDD and a few smaller ones that I can use as temp storage to migrate VMs over from the Areca storage array, then I can pull the 3TB drives out of the Areca array, setup freenas then transfer the VMs over to the new zpool.

Is this a bad idea? Suggestions welcome.

 

[voodooFX]

So now you have an all-in-one solution and you want to move to a dedicated storage server and at the same time "massively increase storage performance".

Since you are already using SSDs as datastore you will need some serious stuff to massively increase the performance, along with 10G connectivity..

What are you planning to use on the ZFS server? More SSDs?

 

[ColPanic]

This will still be an all-in-one solution but I will use freenas or nappit to manage storage instead of the raid card Bios. I have a couple of SSDs that I'm using as one very small small datastore - the main storage are hdd, but because everything is running from the RAID cards the only write cache is 512mb that is on the card.