I appreciate all of the responses! As I have said, I am very open to suggestions and constructive criticism, and I am very glad for all of the support! That being said, the forums can get very scary for people, because some like to bring the fire and brimstone responses, without fully understanding the situations.
As of now, I am building 2 Freenas setups myself and helping a friend with another one. The first one will be baremetal on a 12 wide 2TB raidz2. I plan to test and learn as much as I can with this machine. It will be the first one that will be put into "home production."
Then I plan on setting my personal freenas server up on bare metal first. I plan to test and stress it a bit. Then once I feel comfortable, I plan to load freenas in Exsi on that machine with PCI pass-through via 2 M1505 sata cards. Hopefully, i can get the drives and system working identically, whether I boot from bare metal or boot via Exsi. This is my biggest goal. If this works, then I will treat the machine horribly :). I plan to bounce between baremetal and VM, pull drives, start rebuilds, reboot again, etc... Once I am convinced that the VM layer is not messing with ZFS, I will then try to install windows on Exsi and PCI pass-through a video card. Assuming this goes smoothly, my windows machine will run a mysql server and my windows media center server/DVR. All other services I plan to use freenas plugins.
Thereafter, I will help my buddy get set up with roughly the same setup. However, he also plans to run a linux based firewall too.
Does anyone have any constructive criticism or suggestions if you disagree with this plan?
As mentioned a while back, I have been running onboard intel raid 5 arrays for the past 6-7 years. Luckily, I have never lost anything, but I have had quite a few scares. This setup should be much "safer" and stable! It will also simplify my setup throughout my house.
Thanks again for all the advice.