I have been working with VMware products for many years. Recently, I decided to extend my home lab and bought a HP ML 110 G6 server . These HP servers are a good choice for a home lab, they have the look and feel of the enterprise stuff, are affordable and are pretty able to run VMware ESXi (although the compatibility of the G5 was better…).
VMware ESXi is the future, I found this great blogpost, Installing VMware ESXi 4.0 on a USB Memory Stick “The Official Way” , plugged a memory stick in the internal USB connector, installed ESXi, created a local VMFS partition and started creating VM’s.
I think one has to be independent and it is always good to know how other vendors (especially in the field of Virtualization are doing). And the best way is to download and install, in my case, first on my list is Microsoft Hyper-V server 2008 R2. And it would be nice to have both on the same hardware, just like in the old days with a dual boot Windows/Linux PC…