....buy Fusion to manage ESXi...
That's just a ridiculous position. Why would anybody want to buy a copy of virtualization software 'plus' a client os just to be able to manage a os-agnostic virtualization 'server' ?
I could probably manage ESXi from my tablet browser if they had a vendor-neutral and fully capable web management interface, or alternately a CLI that wasn't a maze of twisty little passages. Having run VMware Workstation since its earliest releases, and Fusion for a while, and Parallels now, and VirtualBox occasionally, my experience thus far with ESXi is that it has the lamest administrative mindset I could possibly imagine. Just a convoluted mess from a workflow standpoint, and from documentation, and the hellish maze of their support website.
Hire a dozen usability engineers and just redo the whole thing top to bottom. The technology works. The administrative interfaces and docs and support sites are just beyond brutal.