[citation][nom]elektrip[/nom]thanks, found out after creating the login...can't quote anonymous.Well I dream of a VMware ESX System with several guests: W2k8 Server as Fileserver, Astaro Security Linux, XP/Vista/7 (and OS X). But as long as there is no native performance for gaming, I still need separate hardware for those specific needs.[/citation]
Please change your dream then!
Don't get me wrong, esx is great. But the good thing about it is, that you don't waste as many resources as you would if all were real iron boxes. Do NOT use esx for serious fileserving in a live enviroment. It'll work, but it's just not fast enough. For a license server, or a print server or whatever it's fine. But don't install something that requires heavy IO on top of an esx. You can do that if it's for experimentation, but that's it. I installed a 2008 server with wds one day. And tried to deploy a computer. Works great, but very slowly. Deploying the same image to another system from the real physical box was MUCH faster. Took significantly less time.
Anyway, it will work okay if the workload isn't very high, but you will lose a lot in a maximum transfer rate scenario.
Also, remember that esx doesn't work on just any hardware. You need to shop for hardware that actually works with esx. But most brand name server systems support it. Homebrew might, but probably won't out of the box.
At our company we're working almost exclusively with HP servers, and I know you can get some of those with esx running off of flash on the motherboard itself. So you don't need running a raid 1 on your esx hosts in addition to the raid 5/6/whatever on your storage box. (professional enviroment)
Imo if you want the stuff for 'fun/testing' stuff, just go with a gsx or workstation on your favorite linux or windows platform. Those will run on almost any platform, and you won't be limited to particular storage controllers, motherboards or similar. You'll forfeit the options for VC, HA etc, but in a test enviroment those are worthless anyway.