Just curious if any are planning on downsizing their home lab environment this year? Either in terms of hardware, or the type of hardware you are using? Examples: switching from full-blown enterprise servers to mini PCs, consolidating network equipment, migrating as much as possible to containers?
Check out my latest post here covering many of these topics:
https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2024/03/how-to-downsize-your-home-lab/
I'm definitely downsizing. I'm moving from a dual LGA2011-3 Xeon system down to 2 of the Minisforum MS-01 machines. I still have my other ESXi server which is also running Haswell, as it's also my NAS. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that one next. But getting it to use less power would be ideal.
@malcolm-r, you will definitely see massive savings in power consumption moving away from the dual LGA2011-3 Xeon. I think the new generations of mini PCs are going to become the de facto standard in labs due to that fact alone. They have the newest processor generations that can walk circles around the old procs. I am hoping we will see some improvements in memory capacity soon. I think this is the last weakness in this form factor now that MS-01 and others will have PCI-e slots and 10 GbE.