Nested esxi in kvm

Purpose

Purchased an refurbished Dell server with 24 drives, 20 physical cores, and ~386GB RAM.The purpose for this server has changed many times during it's time in the lab, but now it will be a storage backend for both VMware and KVM hypervisors. ZFS will be used as the filsesystem with dedup and compression enabled. Obviously the server is overkill for such a use case. So I would like to run the following

• LXD Containers for my many CentOS 7 based servers. Makes sense to use fast kernel based "virtualization" since they run the same kernel.
• KVM machines that are essentially dedicated to the site the server is hosted in.
• VMWare esxi as a nested hypervisor. This is to maintain compatibility with the existing data center.

Ultimately this will act as a replica and DR site.

Prepare Hardware

If you happen to have used the Dell PERC storage controller and wanted something ZFS friendly, please wipe the meta data from the drives. Otherwise CentOS 7 will not install with an error during Anaconda initialization.

• Boot from rescue media and perform the following on all drives.

dd if=/dev/zero of=$YOUR_DEV bs=512 seek=$(( $(blockdev --getsz $YOUR_DEV) - 1024 )) count=1024

I do not have the orignal link to reference. But this would have saved me a lot of time as I was using shred on all the drives instead.
At this point I had installed the "IT Mode LSI SAS 9207-8i SATA/SAS 6Gb/s PCI-E 3.0 Host Bus Adapter LSI00301" I bought off ebay, which gave me direct disk access to all drives. ZFS is happy.

Start Installing Software

Install ZFS

yum install http://download.zfsonlinux.org/epel/zfs-release.el7_5.noarch.rpm
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/zfs.repo
...
Disable ZFS, enable ZFS-KMOD.
...

install zfs
modprobe zfs