To extend my homelab I was searching for a cheap homeserver hardware that was listed in the Compatibility Guide by VMware. My target was that the system must be supported with ESXi 5.5. There were 3 systems that are in the market since about 5 years and sold as refurbished systems and one system from Lenovo that has a brand-new Haswell CPU.

Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen III

Dell PowerEdge R710

ProLiant DL380 G6 Server

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140

Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen III

Release date: 2008

CPU: Quad-core or Dual-core Intel Xeon 54xx, 53xx, 52xx, or 51xx series (Merom)

CPU Sockets: 2

Max Memory: 64GB

Drive Bays: 8x 2.5" or 4x 3.5"

Supported OS: ESXi 4.0, ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0, ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5

Available as refurbished server from $400 at Amazon

Dell PowerEdge R710

Release date: 2009

CPU: Quad-core or six-core Intel Xeon processor 55xx and 56xx series (Nehalem)

CPU Sockets: 2

Max Memory: 288GB

Drive Bays: 8x 2.5" or 6x 3.5"

Supported OS: ESXi 4.0, ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0, ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5

Available as refurbished server from $600 at Amazon

ProLiant DL380 G6 Server

Release date: 2009

CPU: Dual-core, Quad-core or six-core Intel Xeon processor 55xx and 56xx series (Nehalem)

CPU Sockets: 2

Max Memory: 192GB

Drive Bays: 16x 2.5" or 6x 3.5"

Supported OS: ESXi 4.0, ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0, ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5

Available as refurbished server from $600 at Amazon

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140