Thanks for the welcome 
That's fantastic thanks, it really does pay to ask I shall have a look into the vSphere Storage Appliance, it does indeed sound like a possible solution. Does this leave me with a single point of failure though if one of the physical servers goes down?
This is why I have always been wary of shared storage as if the SAN/NAS goes down then all VM's relying on that SAN/NAS will be unavailable. I have always thought the best solution is to use local storage and if possible replicate/mirror to a standby by server. I am still new to this and have a lot to learn so sorry if I sound naive.