Checking to see if it meets my needs, yet.

The NUC worked perfectly. I ended up switching back to Fedora because the cost of the VMware license wasn't worth it on an old Skylake NUC which is no longer supported. I'd do it again on modern hardware.

For the DL360 and an Nvidia 1660ti the only caveat was that Nvidia's driver stack wouldn't enable CUDA in VMs even after applying various workarounds. If I had to do it again I'd buy an AMD video card and a Dell server. AMD doesn't fight the user about fully enabling consumer video card features when passed through to virtual machines and Dell releases the latest driver and BIOS updates for free rather than hiding them behind a maintenance paywall like HPE and updates are crucial to stay abreast of CVEs.

With supply chain issues and chip shortages video cards are so expensive and hard to get the idea of sharing one device between VMs as needed vs building multiple PCs or even multibooting is quite appealing.

Beyond that you have enterprise-class equipment available cheap in the secondary markets so you can host your VMs on ECC memory, raided storage and talk to your network at 10 or 40 gigabits.

I realize this is a bit far afield of your original ask but ESXi on laptop-class hardware like the NUC works great. Finally if you do decide to use VMware on consumer or prosumer hardware I highly recommend William Lam's blog: https://williamlam.com/

Now I dual boot Manjaro and a small windows partition, and just use qemu for most of my basic VMS.

At home, I run Linux on my laptop and use KVM/libvirt for the kind of stuff you're discussing (when docker won't do, that is).

I recommend it.