I just did setup a DELL R720XD with ESXi, and one Ubuntu server headless 20.04 vm. Used 3 1TB SSD data in raid 0 for the temp, on the PERC controller, and some HDDs alone on raid 0 (there is no passthrough on the PERC 710 raid controller). I attached the above PERC virtual devices as raw disks to Ubuntu, so there should be no overhead due to the ESXi disk virtualization.
Only downside is that with the free version of ESXi you can only allocate 8 CPUs to each OS. But you can easily launch more VM as explained here.
I have just launched the system and it is now syncing and plotting in parallel. At a first glance the speed it seems pretty much limited by the SSD/HHD speed. Will test with a NVME and compare with the 3 SSDs in raid 0 once it arrives.