Is freeBSD a good choice for new Unix machine? I want to get back into Unix / Linux. System would be used for light scripting and file server needs. Something with nice software or hardware raid support would be good. If it could support virtual machines, kind of like VMWare's ESX that would be great too.
Other choices are Ubuntu, SUSE, RH, etc.
Personally I would recommend RedHat as it's the most widely adopted commercial distribution available[citation needed]. Although RedHat isn't free (you pay for the support), Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux are all based on the same distriibution, and are freely available.
"If it could support virtual machines"? You mean if the VM could act as a hypervisor, like ESX, or if it's possible to run the OS in a VM? Both are possible in RHEL and, I imagine, any other distro.
To run virtual machines on it.
Given that this post is in the BSD subforum, from all the BSD distributions I would recommend FreeBSD. The community is larger, most packages available on Linux are also available on FreeBSD, releases are frequent and it offers enterprise-grade reliability.
If this was a car question, and posted in a Ford forum, despite all the available Fords, I would still recommend a Mercedes 
I would use OpenBSD - the ports system is easier to use and the amd64 version is really quite good. But I also like the FreeBSD community - so if you want to experiment, try FreeBSD as well.