Gortee,
Sorry for the delayed response, but this project got shelved for a few weeks. We're back on it and the project team lists a requirement for ~1TB of storage, although the VMs they specify only a total of 460GB. They were finally able to clarify that they can withstand downtime of about 30 minutes for this application, so I don't need instantaneous failover & recovery. I'm still thinking VSA is the way to go and might try to mitigate the performance issues using SSD instead of SAS on the two ESXi hosts. I've got budget for the host hardware, but we can't justify purchasing an array or NAS to support this environment, I don't think I have another option. Thanks.
Scott