Ok just a follow up on my Crossfire success. It appears it will have no useable merrit in this instance since it will not work without a bridge connector. I can get 2 6770 cards that do not have the option of a bridge (no pins on PCB) to work when booted natively into Windows but not when using the same 2 cards in a VM on the same machine. I beleive the problem is that CCC will not enable software crossfire on a system with another type of GPU present so the VMWare GPU device has thwarted me again. I really wish there was a way to remove this from the virtual hardware.
So my plan to use 2 cards with seperate machines some of the time and then bring them together along with the CPU and RAM resources into one machine has failed. I can only get hardware (bridged/linked) crossfire to work in a VM. I have not tried using 2 cards with a bridge connector attached to 2 seperate VM's as I dont want to risk possibly damaging my hardware. For most of us there will be no use in using 2 PCIe slots for 2 budget cards on one VM when we can use the same 2 slots for good cards serving 2 different VM's.
On a side note not relating to ESXi, Crossfire with no bridge is possible only when the primary card has not got the connector. This differs to AMD's official list which says both must have the connector or both must not. If you have one with and one without this will work aswell.