Back in the day you set up a homelab with enterprise level hardware so that you could gain experience on hardware and platforms you otherwise wouldn't have access to. Cisco firewalls, VMWare Hypervisors, vSan, etc.
I'll run ESXi 7 Enterprise Plus on a 2x 7402 96 thread, 512 GiB lights-out manageable system with 16 TiB of SSD and 140 TiB of HDD (in a 4U JBOD dual path SAS enclosure) at home until the wheels fall off. Attached UPSes have environmental monitoring including temperature and humidity.
