I’ve been considering  building an ESXi host for home to move my VMs off of Vmware workstation on my Windows 7 Desktop. I wanted something powerful but in a small form factor and uses a relatively low amount of electricity. Well… I think I’m almost there.
I’ll update this as I can with performance but so far I’m happy with the results. Right now I have 4 VMs running including PRTG, OpenVPN, and Zoneminder. So far I am pleased.
I have ESXi 5.5 running off of a flash drive.
Physical Components:
(from Amazon)
Shuttle – SH87R6 (You’ll have to inject the NIC driver for the Realtek hardware into the 5.5 image to use the onboard NIC. So far it seems to work great.)
Intel Core i7-4790S Processor (8M Cache, 3.2 GHz)
4x Seagate 500GB Laptop SATA 7200RPM 32MB Cache 2.5-Inch HDD (configured in RAID 10)
2x PNY XLR8 DDR3 16GB (2x8GB) 1600MHz (PC3-12800)(Four DIMMS total for 32GB)
LSI MegaRAID 256MB SAS RAID Controller MR SAS 8888ELP w/ LSIIBBU05(from eBay, pulled from some HP)

 
Hardware monitoring looks good

When backing up my VMs I had an interesting network graph that sort of looks like Michigan