Last year my company moved to a ESXi box for our servers and I was introduced to a hyperviser 1 platform and find I like it a lot. Currently at home I'm running a main PC with Ubuntu Linux using Virtualbox to run Windows 7 for my wife and kids to use. This works ok but I'd like to get more of a bang for the buck with the hardware I'm running and was thinking that I could put the free version of ESXi 5.5 on the platform and then run the Windows 7 system and a Linux system on it that I can access remotely with some old laptops we currently have. Here is the current hardware.
Motherboard: Asus M3A32-MVP DELUXE
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 975 Processor
Memory: 8 gigs
Video: GeForce 9500 GT
Storage: (2) 1Tb Drives
I relatively new to ESXi and can mostly find my way around but specifics like will the above hardware see much of a benefit or even run it are above my current pay grade.
Another reason to switch, if I can, is the possibility of running more than one Windows 7 systems so I could give my wife a dedicated system and have one for the kids to screw up and kill, they've done it before, that I can just restore from a generic base system and not worry about our data. If the kids blow up their system I can hold off until I feel like doing it where as if they blow up ours I have to fix it IMMEDIATELY per SHMBO or I sleep on the couch 
Ideally I'd use a Windows server with 5 RDP cals, we went with that the same time as the ESXi platform, but I've become accustomed to eating at least once a day and on our budget I'd have to change to once a week if I'm lucky to pay for the licenses and OS 
, so if I could work out something with ESXi to scrape together 3 PCs from one it would be nice. They're not power users and don't use the PC for high end games, that what the PS2 is for, so high end graphics or extremely fast systems are not that important just something to run Office and some Home schooling software.
Thoughts?
You're talking to a person that has a PC dedicated to a MAME arcade cabinet that just runs games so dedicating my highest end PC hardware to run in a dark basement while I access it from a laptop or even an older cobbled together machine upstairs won't bother me as long as it gets me some improvements on my current setup. I normally access most of my systems, 2 linux servers, 1 media center pc, Mame PC, wifi router and Family PC, from my iPad on the living room sofa unless someone screws up something and I need a bigger screen and keyboard to work from. If that happens and I have a ESXi system in place it just means using a laptop or the PC in my wood shop to access it instead of sitting down at the main PCs keyboard.
I've done a bit more digging and still haven't determined if the hardware will work at all yet.
Well I dug around a bit and discovered I could install ESXi to a usb flash drive so I decided to try it. Of course I have to do it the hard way as I'm paranoid about doing anything install related to a working system ever since I managed to blow up my work PC because Ubuntu took all my drives, including my data and backup drives and made them into a single LVL volume when changing over from CentOS. My fault but I swore up and down afterword that it had said it was ignoring all drives except the one I was using as a boot drive so I'm very touchy about anything relating to 'installs'. After a couple of hours of playing I managed to create a esxi live usb stick in vmware, actually it became sort of a goal just to see if I could get it to finish the install and it really didn't matter if it worked or not but after I got it made I really had to test it. I opened up the PC and yanked power from the both hard drives so no matter what nothing would be writing to them, yes I could have done this to build the usb stick but again it was a challenge just to do it on a virtual machine, then I rebooted and bingo! ESXi 5.5 booted right up...then told me it couldn't find any network adapters. I grabbed a 1 gig netgear card I had nearby and tried it but got the same thing. So as it stands at least I know the hardware will run but until I can either get a nic that works I can't tell if I'll gain anything by going in this direction. So I'm still at the point of should I or shouldn't I yet.
Yikes I just realized it's 1:30am I really need get some sleep so I don't snoore during my daughters speeches at Kardia tomorrow.....er today.