Dead? No. Never. Not so long there's an IT dept in any business. I think they're here to stay for the tinkerers. Yeah, prices are going nuts for current and last generation equipment, but so is everything else outside computers even. With the (un)certain political BS that's going on, things are going to shift, there's no getting around that. I know that DDR4 is going up, as is DDR5, yes, absolutely, but, there's also ways to still work on both the hardware and software. Prices on modern equipment is insane as of late. But there's also a lot of equipment now that's going to the scrap heap due to certain TPM requirements, so you can score yourself enough hardware to continue the work on your lab if needed, with another machine and adding it to a ProxMox cluster, or turn it into a NAS or whatever. You don't have to go "new". You can go for "old-ish" if it's a generation or two old. Like, one could run a modern Linux on a Pentium 4, 2ghz system, with 8gig of RAM and still do the experimentation with running Docker, Portainer, or build up a web server on metal just for the experience of it. For a "HOME LAB", that hardware is plenty enough. You're not feeding the masses of the WORLD, you're feeding the LAN. I run 10 year old server grade hardware (Anyone who knows my long posts, knows I love talking about it, so I'll spare the details... again) and it's STUPIDLY overkill for what the requirements are in the house. Anyone in any hobby is going to find a way to continue their hobby. It doesn't matter the hobby. Tech or basket weaving. People will find a way to enjoy what they enjoy, even if it costs a couple bucks more.

@Jose Pelaez NUCs for $50 even.... Swarm of Proxmox nodes inbound..... >:]

I'm maintaining size and scope unless this 10+year old hardware decides to give up the ghost. If I do downsize, it'll be just to power off one or two of the nodes after I migrate the VMs off to the to-be primary machine. chances are it'd be temporary as I prefer redundancy versus having money I guess?

I use VMWare at work, ProxMox at home. VMWare for close to 20 years since I started where I'm working at. I have (had?) paperwork from VMWare for training in all things VMWare from 15 years ago, and all that. I'm pretty good with it. ProxMox at home, I've been using it for about the same amount of time, just not on the Enterprise grade hardware I have now, but, on desktop PCs and such. Your comment in your blog: "But here is the important part. It is 100 percent functional for everything I want to do. I kind of had an epiphany after looking back at this past year. I care far less about polish than I thought I did, and far more about the capabilities and day-to-day management." For me, function over form every day, every time, all the time, no exceptions. If you can't get to where you need to be fast, quickly, and efficiently, then it's not worth the effort. I don't care about flashy modern looks, I care about consistency, getting to the place that's familiar from 20 years of experience, and get in and out as fast as I can. Take me back to DOS TUI, I don't care, so long that it's a few keyboard clicks away, I'm happy.

1> Firewall - I don't trust ISP provided modems to act as a router. I don't trust companies that make routers to be resilient enough to last more than a year due to growth of services, bandwidth, and networking limitations (Memory constraints). I use pfSense, put the ISPs modem into bridge mode, pfSense gets an IP from the modem and acts as a router/dns/dhcp to start. 2> DHCP - I have to know what is on my network, which is why I spent SO MUCH TIME writing the tooling to get IPAM running. DHCP will start out in a default config to get whomever I need out on the network, but its intent is to take over whatever pfSense had to offer. [3, 4, and 5, I may swap around] 3> IPAM - Need something to control the DHCP/DNS servers 4> Semaphore - For Ansible builds, Github controlled configuration for almost everything 5> DNS - PiHole is my go to. I may try out the other one mentioned for funsies. 6> haProxy - To get external web requests into my network for my personal use 7> KASM - When I need to get onto my network without a VPN (Because work won't let me install VPN software to get me home when "needed") 8> ChangeDetection - Because I like knowing when certain websites change "something", be it product, pricing, etc. Discord notifies me of those changes. I have it poke the remote sites periodically, typically once a day, some are weekly, so I'm not lambasted with minute by minute changes. 9> Pulse - Monitor the above 8 (and more) "things" I'll put on my network. Note, no AI garbage. i have an n8n instance, but with the answers and fights I have with my LLM on my 5070, not worth the fight. I may look at writing my own logic cores for it to function when problems are documented, but even then I wouldn't trust it. Notification is enough. If I cannot trust the answers I get from an LLM, or its results, I'll have nothing to do with it for automation purposes, period. I'll go to Claude or ChatGPT to get answers, sure, but that's me ACTIVELY looking at its answers and deciding the validity then and there.

"When you combine Ollama with OpenWebUI as part of your home lab services, it gives you a way to totally duplicate what you can do with something like ChatGPT and control everything locally. It works with the CPU only, albeit very slowly, but if you add a GPU with GPU passthrough, you will drastically improve your experience." I highly, HIGHLY disagree with this. There are no GPUs on the market that a home labber is going to be able to afford that's going to do what the big boys do. Period. I run a 5070 (As I said) and the "conversation" side of it is horrible, no matter the model. Sure you're going to get an answer faster on a GPU compared to a CPU, but the slop is seriously real. Granted, fine, learning about it could be something important to know about, but saying "totally duplicate what you can do with something like ChatGPT" is far, far from any experience I've had local vs OpenAI/Anthropic.

I haven't read, but I also have to agree from the get-go that enterprise hardware, even retired, is better than consumer level hardware, for different reasons. The other side is that a lot of these notices are about how stuff is going to affect GPUs or upgrading your machines is going to be expensive. We're talking a few hundred bucks for a kit of RAM where our consumer level motherboards don't run well with 64gig of RAM to begin with. But when you go look, businesses that aren't into AI are going to be buying more machines regularly to upgrade. Amazon, Azure, Google, whatever, they need to do their fleet wide upgrades themselves, and they're going to need to upgrade their machines. Granted, ALL of these companies are ALSO doing AI and are ALSO part of the price inflation. No question. So they're basically shooting themselves in the foot by not getting the engineers to make AI more better to work with less memory.

@Divine Divine mornin