Right, I've created my 2 ESXi hosts with VMware Workstation. Each has 4GB of RAM and 5 disks, as mentioned above:
I'll be using virtual disks directly connected to the hosts for now, later on I'll come up with a common shared datastore solution.
Anyway I went ahead and created another VM with VMware Workstation and used Windows Server 2K8 as the guest OS. Once that was up and running I proceeded to install vCenter Server:
Next I created a DRS cluster with my two virtual ESXi hosts and everything seems to be running fine.
It quickly became apparent that vCenter Server would definitely like to have more than 4GB of RAM, but for now things seem to work.
Now my pièce de résistance is a PCI-Express SSD, the famous OCZ RevoDrive (RevoDrive 3, 120GB) which offers a maximum throughput of 1GB/s for sequential reads and 130K IOPS:
I was planning to have the RevoDrive entirely dedicated to vSphere but the main SSD of my PC has failed and so I installed Windows 8 on it. However I split it into 2 partitions, and I'll be using the second one for vSphere datastores.
Not exactly the best idea but at the moment I don't have many options. I'm not very concerned though as Windows isn't doing much with the disk when idle.