As a senior systems engineer i took the responsibility to also design VMware environments. So far it been a lot of fun but also sometimes a lot of headaches. Since some customers insist to keep prices low they choose for low CPU like E5-2609 but I prefer the E5-2620 v2 or higher for basic virtualization.

so I found I site to compare all the CPU. I think its pretty good one so you can get some stats to tell to your customer why you should take higher CPU level.

here is the compare of E5-2609 v2 and a E5-2620 v2

Compare CPU