Looking to upgrade homelab

[stiltner]

Debating on what direction I want to go.

Considering 2 x HP Microserver Gen10+ units running ESXI, but it appears they are rather limited @ 64GB each.

Or, just getting my big boy pants on, and just grabbing a nice 1u unit with an Epyc 7302 or 7402 and 256GB and a
shit ton of SSD's in it.

They both offer 10GB connections, I can grab the HP's for about $550/ea right now.
The Asrock will run about 5x that with CPU and memory thrown in.

I'd recommission my Lenovo with RAID5 4TB'ers and a Dell 1U I have (strip out the 8 x 128gb SSD) and put those in the
new server(s).

What's your thoughts. Again, don't compare the $, compare the purpose and value. This is for ESX7, and a full blown training lab.
I have a Fortigate firewall, and will buy a suitable 10GB switch for the servers to sit on.

 

[RevPuk]

What are you testing in the lab? If you're testing infrastructure deployment components and nesting hypervisors and ACI/Netbrain type stuff I would say as many smaller nodes as possible. If you're just pushing out gen purpose Wintel boxes or app labs, go raw horsepower.