Some may not agree with my findings on the security portion, but according to National Institute of Standards and Technology, SQL had the fewest number of reported vulnerabilities.

For pure ESXi, I recommend the HP blades with internal ssd for use with vflash. This also works great in 5.5 to boost application performance (learned first-hand). The storage is a little trickier without knowing the proposed workloads. Tintri is what my team has used in…