I've used ESXi et al in a professional environment, but mostly have wanted to shy away from anything that reeks of potential vendor-lock for my own personal "hobbyism".
I'm hoping in the very near future to deploy several (probably about five) (personal) servers into geographically diverse locations, all of which will be troublesome and rare to regain physical access to for administration; I'm hoping that this project will allow me ease of administration and reliability.
As much as I would love to truly "DIY" with e.g., Debian and XL, I just don't trust myself to maintain as high reliability/uptime (not to mention easy cross-site consistency) as a "prepacked shrink-wrapped management ecosystem" on the bare metal can provide, and it's great to see one of these with a dedication to FOSS principles.