Recommendations for a home (vm) server

[Stephen Rees-Carter]

Hi all,

My work has just given me $1,000 to spend on a new home server machine
which I intend to run as a virtual machine host, either as 12.04
Virtualbox headless or ESXi.
But the only hardware I've bought in the last 4 years has been two
Lenovo laptops and a cheap Toshiba for my wife, so I'm a bit out of
the loop for what's good/bad on the market in terms of desktops and
home servers.

So I was hoping that you guys could help me out...

Since it's going to be a VM host, I'm after something with decent
specs, lots of RAM, and multiple large disks.
Also no wacky hardware that Ubuntu doesn't support. My budget is max $1,000.

Can anyone recommend a brand/model or at least point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance,
~Stephen

-- 
Stephen Rees-Carter ~ Valorin
http://stephen.rees-carter.net/