Welcome to the Community - The hardware looks good the only thing I would recommend is to increase the amount of memory - 16 GB of memory is rather light. You will also need a machine and it can be virtual to house your vcenter server.
In terms of SAN I would look at either iSCSI or NAS for the only reason is you would not have to put in a FC network that will save money.
I would also recommend training particularly VMware's 5 day ICM class - it not only will give a good framework as to how virtualization works but will give you thte tools and knowledge to implement the cluster effectively and to add the interaction with the other students and instructor will strengthen your knowledge.