I really don't understand that fight.
SAN storage and VmWare (ESXi) have been around forever.
VmWare will gladly provision VMs over any SAN storage. Live migration has been available for more than 10 years (that's called VMotion and it requires any of paid edition).
Prefer local storage? Put any sort of local storage on the server, VmWare will gladly provision VM on it.
What's the most important thing in a storage... THE BACKUP!
For backups, there are snapshots capabilities well integrated into VmWare (cold snapshots, live snapshots, incremental snapsnots, whatever you name it).
All of this has existed for more than ten years. Standard protocols (iSCSI, FiberChannel, other) + robust enclosures (all vendors have SAN) + battle tested software and drivers (VmWare).
A couple servers and some TB of storage is a nothing fancy. The cost of the setup is shared between the servers + the labor + many SAS hard drives + the enclosure (a very little part).
It's really hard to take seriously an overly complex setup that is trying to imitate that over cheap untested hardware and software (NFS? seriously?).
Not only it is a recipe for disaster in production but there isn't even any cost savings to be done.
The cost of complexity and labors will be going wild with all the configuration. The hardware costs won't go down (still need many drives and servers). Good luck debugging that and retrieving data when things will go wrong.
Well. I suppose it's fun for home labs and that's about it :D