Re: I want to play with VMs
For hardware, I would suggest you look out for the frequent cashback deals on the HP ML110 server (takes 32GB RAM) or similar HP deals
For Software, I would install Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (completely free download from Microsoft and is fully featured with no functionality limits - outperforms open source hypervisors such as KVM or Xen, and doesn't have the functionality limits of the 'free' VMWare versions...)
I run a pair of these in a resilient setup....