I doubt if there is any way you could get exactly same performance . You can see stuff like hardware acceleration, Memeory reservation , change the VSWAP location etc etc to improve the performance. esxi itself doesn't have the impact. Its about to what extent your memory/BUS speed/Hard drive RPM etc etc can cope with VMWARE .
If you try hypervisors form other vendors then you will see completely different story .
It differ from case by case basis . If you have one server then I recon use disk mirroring and get rid of VMware .