If you want to take advantage of all the bells and whistles of VMware vSphere that makes it worth using (e.g. failover/vMotion) you will need shared storage (hardware or software), decent networking and shell out for at least the cheapest licenses (as well as the support they force you to buy)which give you some of the tools/benefits but not all.

The first question I have is, do you really need it, is there a need for all these bells and whistles?