I was planning to get a Dell PowerEdge r515 configured with ESXi already installed (2x Opteron 8core 4386 3.1ghz, 32gb ram, 6x2tb raid5). Weighing in at 7k+.
Now, that's going to be a hard sell to the company. Another tech came up with 2k for a custom build around consumer grade components, a lot of which weren't mentioned in the compatibility list (3ghz i7, prosumer mobo, single PSU etc.)
If you had a budget of 5k, the less spent on it the better, what would you buy?