I've found that the home lab is a great place for cast-off corporate equipment either bought from ebay or scrounged from data center upgrades. Mine, assembled at little to no cost, consists of:
42u IBM-branded cabinet
Cisco ASA 5510 firewall
Dell R610 running ESXi
Old Dell 2950 full of 2TB drives running FreeNAS
Cisco 'Small Business' 50 port managed switch
A couple of 4U server cases containing the guts of obsolete gaming systems, repurposed as assorted servers
If you've got the space and can deal with the noise, I can't say too many good things about the R610s - available dirt cheap, and though they're about four generations old at this point, still perform decently since Intel/AMD have, until recently, pretty much stagnated on CPU performance.
Luckily I have a basement.
42u IBM-branded cabinet
Cisco ASA 5510 firewall
Dell R610 running ESXi
Old Dell 2950 full of 2TB drives running FreeNAS
Cisco 'Small Business' 50 port managed switch
A couple of 4U server cases containing the guts of obsolete gaming systems, repurposed as assorted servers
If you've got the space and can deal with the noise, I can't say too many good things about the R610s - available dirt cheap, and though they're about four generations old at this point, still perform decently since Intel/AMD have, until recently, pretty much stagnated on CPU performance.
Luckily I have a basement.