Intel NUCs are small, silent, transportable and have a very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. On CES 2015 Intel officially presented their new Broadwell NUCs which will be available in a few weeks.

Intel NUCs are not officially supported by VMware but they have a great community support. They are proven in many homlabs or even for demonstrating Virtual SAN deployments.

Broadwell CPU

i7 NUC announced (Q2/2015)

No changes in memory support (max. 16GB)

Available with and withouth 2.5" HDD slot