I can certainly pay for VMUG, but it’s not my primary role or expertise. This is just homelabbing to run some hobbyist stuff, and to stay on my toes for work. I’m never surprised anymore how many times a contracted consultancy (some big names too) claimed they couldn’t do something, even a POC, and if they could, it’d take 10x the man hours and resources. Then I go into the work lab and throw together a POC in a weekend by myself. That being said, I checked and the license of my current client doesn’t include VMUG. They also probably won’t pay for a license for me too since it’s not part of my normal role. I’ll check my former universities later. It’s been years since I attended but I still have access to various university resources.Never underestimate QoL... that's one of my key criteria now. Could you spring for the $180-200 a year for VMUG or even get your work to help pay for it? You would get all these features back and surely otherwise your extra admin time over a year is going to effectively cost way more than $200.
I used Debian, but yeah. I run k8s in k3s VMs as well. I've just started a topic here in the Linux admin section asking for advice on how to best do a mix of containers, VMs, and storage in my environment if you wanted to chip in.
I forget exactly but let's say something like £250 (~$330) door to door. Not a budget item, I think the i7 8700T is a better deal if you need threads or the i7 9700T if you don't, their Passmarks are almost the same as each other (about 10,600 vs the i9 9900T at almost 14,000) but they're a lot cheaper than the i9 9900T.
QoL is indeed important. As I get older I find less time for “hobbies.” I had manually curated my Plex library for years, and recently got into the *arrs. It has been a godsend. Yes, sometimes automating stuff doesn’t grab the version of stuff I would’ve done manually, but the result is I have to spend much less time minding things.
VMWare stack is indeed easier to manage, but at the same time I’m also interested in Promox and haven’t taken a deep dive into it previously beyond a cursory look. You’re probably right though, in the end VMWare might work out better for me, and I should keep Proxmox as a side hobby to learn.
I considered k8s and k3s, but that seems quite overkill for a home lab. Same for ceph. I feel a bit burnt out babysitting my FreeNAS/TrueNAS servers. ZFS is awesome and my new Synology DS1821+ is quite limited but I have to deal with less stuff. I’m even considering moving a lot of stuff to Google cloud since the yearly buying dozens of hard disks to shuck is a huge money sink too.
I switched to AMD a few years back for workstations so haven’t kept up with the Intel side. I had initially presumed the 9700T had HT also, and was disappointed to find out I’d need a 9900T for that. I did see that the PassMarks between a 8700T and 9700T is basically the same. Skylake derivatives are quite power limited in later iterations after all. My initial excitement towards getting a 9900T has been tempered a bit. If I need more cores I’m sure around the corner the P340s will come down in price and I can grab a 10700T or even 10900T then.