Recomendation for home server.

Dandle · Wednesday at 22:29

Just wondered if i could pick some brains on here. I have a trusty old Dell T20 server which has served me well over the years but is well and truely past its sell by date now. We are just finishing on the house renovations now and I have a home lab with all my networking equipment in a rack and its probably time I move on to a new server. The current server runs two VMs on ESXI and I would like to keep ESXI if i can as i know how it works, so Ive been looking at Dell servers again as the VMware is still available as a free image for dell machines.
I have £1500 to spend (2k at a push) and would like to include storage drives in that cost if i can. My current storage is 2tb drive mirrored and a 12tb media drive so not massively demanding. Ive been looking at Dell T140 and T150s in this price range including used units on ebay. I was going for these over rack mount units as i believe they are quieter being small office servers.

Do you have any recomendations on what I should be looking for within my budget?

cokecan · Thursday at 16:57

I haven't been following too closely but I believe that ESXi (or a version of it) is now free again for non-production/lab uses. That means you shouldn't be tied into Dell if you don't want to be. The other question is do you specifically need server-grade hardware for your home lab? e.g would a main brand (dell, Lenovo, hp) workstation fit the bill while still retaining a bit of the expected reliability as they will be far cheaper, more energy efficient and quieter than a traditional server.

Edit: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/399823/vmware-esxi-80-update-3e-now-available-a.html

LostCorpse · Thursday at 20:03

still wouldnt touch it though... VMware (and i used to love it untill it went wonky :/ )
they'll do something to break it or limit it.

agree with cokecan a workstation will be fine, depending on model, you get 4+ expansion bays and basic raid.
them being enterprise machines will be more power efficient, and parts should be easier to find as well

Dell Outlet Precision 3680 Tower Workstation

£1k

Scalable performance
Up to 28TB of storage, configurable with 3x on-board M.2 SSDs and 3x SATA hard drives. Up to 128GB of DDR5 memory.

worth keeping eye on the outlet

obviously doenst come with IDRAC so it depends if thats something thats important to you

Dandle · Thursday at 22:18

Thanks both, I'll take what you both said into consideration and have a look.
I quite like the look of the Dell poweredge T160 but it's a little out of budget for what I want to pay.

SoundsGood · Thursday at 22:49

What workloads are you intending to run on it?

Dandle · 2026-03-06T18:07:52+0000

Well i put an offer in on a T160 and got it for 1500. Spec is Xeon 6 6315, 16gb DDR5 5600, Perc 355 and 2tb Hard disk. Going to look for a couple of SAS drives now if ay one has any suggestions on 10-12TB drives?

It seem VMWare are no part of broadcom so ESXI is now a cost product. Im going to try proxmox and windows server on it first with HA running as a small VM.

Semple · 2026-03-06T18:29:16+0000

Dandle said:
Well i put an offer in on a T160 and got it for 1500. Spec is Xeon 6 6315, 16gb DDR5 5600, Perc 355 and 2tb Hard disk. Going to look for a couple of SAS drives now if ay one has any suggestions on 10-12TB drives?

It seem VMWare are no part of broadcom so ESXI is now a cost product. Im going to try proxmox and windows server on it first with HA running as a small VM.

You're a bit late to the party!

As cokecan mentions though, I seem to recall Broadcom u-turning on their decision to abandon the community version of ESXi.

Before anyone can really advise, they'd need to know what sort of workload you're dropping on there. 1500 notes is a lot of money on a machine with very little memory and storage.