Hey guys, we are trying out virtualization at work for the first time and i had a question. Ok so we bought the lowest version of Vmware (Vsphere essentials). It lets up have up to 3 physical machines, and it doesn't come with vmotion or High availability. The main machine we got for this is a Dell R510. The R510 will be one out of the three physical servers and i was going to add a poweredge 840 also to the cluster.

Say i create a vm on the R510 and i need to take it down for some reason, and i need to move the vm to the poweredge 840. Will i run into driver problems since it's on completely different hardware?

With the Essentials kit you'll have vCenter and you can simply shut down the VM, right click and select Migrate. The hardware that the VM sees is virtualized so the change won't make a difference. The VM will see the specific CPU model but in this case you're sticking with Intel CPUs.

Going from AMD to Intel for some Linux VMs would be an issue.

If you wanted to use vMotion, you would have to configure Enhanced vMotion Compatability on a cluster to ensure that the VMs start with a CPU feature set that is available on all hosts. You could also manually set a CPU mask for each VM to accomplish this.

Thanks again Dave.