<p>I've been wondering, as a lone game developer, 
or to say a part of team which has only got programmers and people who like to play games...
How do I manage the void created by lack of artists (sprites/tiles/animations) in such a situation???</p>

<p>What do you do in that case? and suppose I am a student, with no money to hire artists, is there a place where I can get these resources legally &amp; free ?</p>

The first thing you'll gain by switching will be a substantially more powerful platform that's running directly on the bare-metal of your server.
From my experience, moving
up
the VMware application stack has never been problematic (Server to Workstation to ESX). However, I would verify this by exporting all of your VMs from the workstation install to an ESX install to make sure you're not seeing any 'weird' issues related to running the high-end tool from VMware.
From my [limited] experience, scripts also carry-over cleanly: each offering moving up their product line doesn't break lower-level tools, but do add substantial improvements.