Virtualization Times

I have a friend who has a small business. He has about half a dozen windows machines on the desktops. On the backend, he has a fairly beefy server (AMD Phenom X3, 8GB RAM, 3TB RAID array). He is running VMware Server 2.0 on a CentOS 5.x box, and he has two XP VMs on this box. He also has a very large partition on this machine, which he is serving out as several shares through Samba to the desktops.

Unfortunately, VMware Server has gotten a little, um, flaky with current Linux versions. I have had problems with it on a Debian installation, and he had a power outage a couple of weeks ago, and the server wouldn't come back up for two or three days. Then he called me.

Now I would like to convert him over to VMware ESXi (either 3.5 or 4.0, since the machine is 64-bit), but there remains the problem of the samba shares. Is it possible for esxi to have a second or subsequent data store and serve out shares to the windows machines? I had thought about building another VM to serve these files out, but that doesn't feel right. It seems like another layer of obfuscation, plus he is a bit nervous about trusting his archives (some go back to 1992) to VMware, with the experience he had with Server. Does anyone know of another (better?) way?

Thanks,

--Storm