I was in your shoes a few years ago. I wish I had VMware then...So my 2 cents is take some time to research virtualization software. You'll be able to things with virtual machines that you can't do with physical servers like deploying new servers from a gold master VM in under 10 minutes or starting a library of VM's for test/dev purposes

Plus you can't beat the price of free software from VMware(Player/VMServer) or Xen if you don't need to run Windows