I work at a school using VMware essentials on 3x Dell 2950s each with 2 quad core XEON CPUs I'm looking at buying a home workstation that I can create VMware servers on for training mainly. My aim is to be able to move VMs to/from my workstation and the school DELLs.
So my question is really regarding hardware. I'm looking at a powerful workstation possibly with 16Gb of ram. The sticking point (I think) is the CPU. I'm pondering on quad core Intel i5, i7 and an Amd 8-core cpu. If a VM is created on the DELL Xeon server with say, a virtual dual core, will that VM work on my home system if I buy any of the aforementioned CPU.s (that’s i5, i7 and AMD 8 core bulldozer)? If yes it’s ok, does that also mean I can transfer VMs between the AMD system and the XEON servers and all will be ok?
This is probably a very simply question to answer, it’s just I can't see anything like it anywhere on the web and want to be 100% sure before committing to an 'expensive purchase'. I aim to put free vSphere on my home workstation and possibly dual boot (if possible?) or use separate boot disks.
My second question is: will vSphere ESXI run on most 'home user' mainstream motherboards? I've been looking at a MSI H77MA-G43 H77 Socket 1155 if I go Intel and an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 Socket AM3+ if I go for AMD?
I aim to make my purchases this weekend ahead of the xmas break (delivery times)
Thanks in advance
Mac