A few critical rules concerning the design of resonators used for high-power laser diode end-pumped CW solid-state lasers were presented in this paper. Following these rules and utilizing a numerical computation procedure, it is possible to find out optimal cavity configurations characteristic of a wide range of thermal stability, a fundamental mode radius within the laser medium which is independent of thermal lensing, being free from astigmatism in the whole cavity and being far away from the edge of the stability region in the range of pump power of interest. Experimental results show that the lasers based on such a resonator can readily be operated with low threshold pump power, high output power and high efficiency.