vSphere Test Environment

We want to setup a vSphere test environment here at the office. We want to kind of match our larger scale enterprise environment at our datacenter, but small & cheap. We want to learn how it works and mess around with it, and in this way never touch actual production environment. What we'd like to do is set up two SANs- again, just a cheaper mock up, with maybe a couple of hosts on each. One SAN would be the replication SAN- so one would replicate to the other (learning replication is part of it.) My supervisor doesn't want to put this proposal for this test environment forward though with actual production vSphere licensing- he's referring me to this kind of thing for "free":

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi5&lp=default&rct=j&q=free%20license%20for%20esxi%205.1%20windows&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http://www.vmware.com/go/get-free-esxi&ei=JJmCUuX2BoW5igLljIC4Ag&usg=AFQjCNELF7MNwSUlf1kuW2AkBZLd2vLCCA 

By doing this demo version- can I really learn vSphere Server.. vMotioning.. replication.. and the big parts of production? Or is there anything of lower cost that they have that I could maybe push for that would have that functionality? Am I sacrificing a lot of "know how" in doing like a demo version for a test environment?