This was the best $14 I've spent on my Homelab.
The processor and memory specs on my Dell PowerEdge R820 running VMWare ESXi 7 are completely fine. Unfortunately, the storage performance was lacking... So, I used a generic $14 PCIe card that allowed me to use an existing M.2 SSD drive as a VMWare datastore. IOPs went from 1K to 54K and power consumption went down by 40W.
Quick video on the process:
