ashtonian5

Most people don't buy "new" hardware. Power efficiency has changed drastically to a point anything before ~2016 is not worth plugging into the wall, and sata to NVME drastically improve responsiveness which didn't become the base standard until 2018ish. Most people use an old desktop or buy old server equipment on ebay.

I have a lab, and I had a lot of configuration state that was annoying to maintain and fragile. I switched to vmug because it has a semi decent terraform provider and I now put most things in TF.

TF to bootstrap vms + rke cluster. TF to deploy helm charts. Still some per app config/backups to mange but I just copy container volumes to all the machines in the cluster with the csi plugin and then back everything up to zfs nas via truenas on NFS.

Runs primarily on 3 dell rx30 series, and then my desktop and htpc are also in vsphere running gpu centric things when I'm not gaming with them.

Vmug is pretty perfect for this -> $180/yr = 16 or 36 physcial sockets.