Actually that doc shows that the 2650 is not compatible with 3i. Howerver; after reading how people here have gotten 3i to run on all sorts of hardware including laptops, I have a hard time believing that. I have no clue as to what specifically makes a server "compatible" or not. My best guess as of now is that it should work, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone who has run 3i on a 2650 can comment on functionality and stability.
If you're buying new, I would go with a 2900 III or 2950 III. It's best to stick with supported just in case you have to call support. Will a 2650 with Perc 3/Di work - I'm 99% sure you'd be Ok. A 2500 with Perc 3/Di was recently tested and works OK - http://www.vm-help.com/Whitebox_HCL.php.
It's quite possible that fast-forwarding the date is causing some other issue than a licensing problem. Your licensing is installed correctly, and if this were a licensing problem you'd get a message specifically about your eval license having expired or VMware would say something along the lines of 'can't power on this VM b/c there's no license for it.' The issue you're experiencing doesn't seem to be license-related.
I just purchase a Dell Poweredge 2650 off of Ebay for $200.00 plus 24.95 for shipping. I pretty good deal if you ask, Dual 2.4 Ghz Xeons, 4 GB of RAM, and two 36GB hard drives. I picked up 3 more drives from www.computergiants.com for the data set. It was just delivered today, and I can't wait to get it tested. I will update after some testing.
yeah not bad for $200, we are using brand new 2900's here for ESXi and some ESX, you can get 10 disks in those servers. We started off using 2650's but you do start to notice the CPU struggling when you have a few machines on it, depends what you're running of course.