Let me spin you my tail of woe…
We had this software package that required a physical server… well that should tell you something right off, anyways wasn’t my decision so we needed a ‘real’ server
So we first bought the cheapest HP server we could… now talk about fail, their install CD would blue screen when trying to install server 2003 of all things…
Couldn’t figure out the hardware in the box, in order to load the RAID drivers using F6 magic (haven’t done that in ages… ) anyways piles of frustration…
So sent that box back and ordered IBM…
Well our vendor, who shall not be named to protect the guilty. Managed to order the wrong drives.. not once… but twice… so finally we have some drives that will work…
And we use the magic IBM CD to install server 2003 which of course crashes out with a script error!!!! Sheesh can’t we catch a break..
Well, after wasting a few hours trying various things… finally hit on this post http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=235819
Apparently, there are some characters you can’t use in your password if you use IBM ServerGuide and my password was lucky enough to contain it! Use a different password and whalaa the magic CD works…
Oh yeah, in VMware I can right click and make a new server in about 2 minutes!
Michael Ellerbeck 
Oh my… have I ever been there before. Well put. There is NOTHING nice anymore about a physical server. They offer me nothing (aside from the occasional SAS/SCSI connections for my tape backups), and are a pain in the rear to try to protect. Bare metal restores… good luck. Out of band management… pay up buddy. Firmware/hardware maintenance, not unless you enjoy working at 2:00am on a Sunday morning. I can’t wait until my SAN is big enough to where I can jettison the few remaining boxes.
I have a couple of really cheap Dell 2850’s if you are interested. 🙂