I’m looking at maybe doing some VMware labs with VMM at home in the future. My worry was hardware. We know we can run Hyper-V on just about any machine (the h/w requirements are pretty basic). It runs nicely on my Dell Latitude E6500. But ESXi and ESX have a pretty limited HCL and my old white boxes probably don’t fall into it. I don’t want to waste money on PC’s.
So I did a little searching and it seems like there is a solution. You can run ESX and ESXi in VMware Workstation. You can get a trial of Workstation for any temporary lab work and run VMware in there. Add another VM and you can run the VMware management.
All you need do now is point your lab VMM server at them and take control.