I've run a homelab for years. My current setup is: Two HP Proliant tower servers with twin Xeons and 32Gb RAM with about 4Tb of storage. They run Windows Hyper-

I've run a homelab for years. My current setup is: Two HP Proliant tower servers with twin Xeons and 32Gb RAM with about 4Tb of storage. They run Windows Hyper-V Server, and are always running 10+ VMs, both Linux and Windows. I run AD, Exchange, SQL, Web, plus various Debian installs doing specific stuff. One of the servers is dedicated to lab work with regard to my actual job. I buy the hardware on eBay as refurbished - something that's ~4 years old can be had for under £500 and is always very capable. When I started out, I self-built the VM server out of consumer parts, but due to the 24/7 usage, had endless problems, so I switched to enterprise kit. They perform faster and have better specs for the price if you buy them secondhand. Most enterprise servers on eBay come with quad port NICs as standard. If you are lucky you'll get iLO or iDRAC included as well. They are bit noisy, but they live in my garage, so I don't hear them. Currently one of my servers has some sort of memory fault causing it to reboot every 6 weeks or so. With consumer kit, you'd be dead in the water, but on boot it just disables that DIMM and carries on with slightly less memory. I need to fix it... but time. In short, I would always recommend an enterprise server over self-build for homelab. you want it to be reliable and not have to worry about it.