As a starting point and as long as you understand that it's a playground that you can make more serious down the line, literally anything will do. Dabble here and there with the software, but I agree with the fact that having room for expansion (i.e. expansion cards) is a nice bonus. As a rule of thumb I'd say that at least four cores (hyperthreading would be good to have but not mandatory) and 16 GB of RAM is a decent starting point that will allow you to run a good bunch of containers and VMs in Proxmox.
FiltroMan
joined 10 months ago
You are seeing on eBay CPUs that WERE worth four thousand dollars, now their only use is either scrap or homelab/homeserver usage.
As someone already mentioned numerous times, it's orders of magnitude more likely that motherboards fail instead of the CPUs: case in point a ESXi server at work that sent some DIMMs belly up because of a faulty motherboard, I somewhat forced the field support technician to not even bother trying the same motherboard with a different CPU (they later tried the same motherboard in their labs with a brand new CPU and the issue stayed the same).
Depending on your workload or activity, even going with refurbished or repurposed chipsets might be the way, as is exactly what a lot of manufacturers on sites such as AliExpress are doing, can save you quite a lot of money and still obtain an acceptable result.
I noticed you asked me in the previous post for some inputs, feel free to ask away either here or via DM, up to you :)
I'm genuinely envious of your setup mate!
I wish I had this many USFF PCs, looking around for Dell Micros, HP G series mini, Lenovo Tiny... The prices are absurd in the EU: stuff that's 10 years old being sold for 150+ EUR