PowerEdge 2950 for VMWare ESXi 5.1?

[ADB100]

I am currently running two Dell XPS i7 Desktops with 24GB RAM as Windows Hyper-V servers at Home. I have various guests that I use for testing, plus my home AD domain across about six guests (some Windows 2003 & some 2008R2). I am hitting some limitations with some guests that I want to install but are only supported on VMware, plus I think I have a memory problem with one of the servers causing the clients to run slow.
I have been offered two PowerEdge 2950's - fairly high spec:

Dual Xeon X5450 3GHz CPUs
32GB DDR2
6 * 2TB SATA hard drives
1 * PSU

Just wondering if these will be better than my current setup? CPU-wise they look slightly slower than the i7 920's that are in the XPS desktops, however there are physically two of them, plus there is more RAM and its ECC RAM. I'd probably replace two of the hard drives and have the system on a mirror of probably smaller drives, then use the four 2TB drives in a RAID 5 array? Haven't fully thought it through yet?
I am fairly sure I can migrate the VM's over to VMware with a bit of patience....

Its an expense I can afford (not sure how happy the wife will be though...) and can maybe recoup some of the cost with selling the XPS's?

Just wondering what peoples thoughts are with the 2950 and whether it would be up to the job? I know its previous generation hardware but I don't need a supercomputer for my home/test environment.

Andy

 

[ADB100]

I have been doing some searching and I think from a performance perspective these servers would be ideal.
However I get the impression that these are noisy machines and this is for home - albeit they are in the attic I think they are going to be far too noisy (and probably power hungry?).

Any suggestions for a decent home VMware server (two of..)?

Andy