Sql – Creating a SQL Template for VMware

Everything you have described is possible -- My suggestion would be to back up the production virtual machines and transfer them to a development vmware host that isn't connected to your normal network, scrub and sanitize the VMs so they're on your test network, and then follow good development practices from then on out (snapshot test before any major changes; do everything in test before promoting to production & keep a list of the changes that need to be made to production.

You can always follow these steps again at any point to "re-sync" production and test, but by not forcibly re-syncing test and production you give yourself more freedom to play with your development.
Also note that since it's VMWare you can clone production again and make a staging environment where you test everything necessary to move from Production's current code base to what just got finished in Dev. You can even swap over Staging and production as part of your deployment, so you always have a clean version of the previous production code to revert to if something blows up.

There is a pretty in depth answer that someone else has used for this problem below:

http://www.thelazysysadmin.net/2009/04/monitoring-vmwares-free-esxi-35-with-cacti/