Is this suitable for a first home server to run a media server, nas and a few containers?

Upgrade RAM and it’ll be fine

If you're going to use VMs or containers when you definitely want more RAM. The CPU looks fine though for that use. If you're using it as a media server you'll get through 500GB in no time at all, so make sure you've got space for more drives.

I've had success using FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) for this sort of thing in the past. That's got the Jails feature for virtualising apps. I haven't used Unraid or proxmox so can't compare it to those.

I use a Optiplex 3060 now (though about to sell it), same processor, upgraded to 64GB of ram (yes it works, even though the spec sheet says 32GB max). I've been running 4 VMs and about a dozen containers with no trouble.

The biggest downsides are lack of SATA ports for connecting a lot of drives, and only a single 1GB nic.

If the price is right, it is a great low power server.

I get a ton of these from work, all 8th-10th gen i5's. I stopped taking them home when I accumulated about 30 of them. I don't really have much of a reason of taking them home, but I've only used 2 of them so far, and they're plenty for what I was wanting to use them for. If anyone in the US wants some, please help. My wife doesn't like the wall of them in my office room.

Depends on the cost, and if chassis style it in (IE can you put more than one drive in it).

Yeah, that would work fine. If you need more storage in the future you can always buy a NAS or DAS. If you use Unraid you can boot off a USB stick and then replace that 500gb SSD with a large NVMe and use that for VM storage.

I have a similar box with the same CPU, but I switched to an NVMe drive and 64gb of RAM. I can comfortably run 5-6 VMs on it, more if they are Linux based

Oh that’s exactly what I got. Currently I got 16gb of RAM in mine, but I do plan on swapping to 64gb soon. I put a 2.5” SSD in mine, and it also has one spot for a m2 drive.

I have proxmox running on mine with several containers running. Jellyseer, jellyfin, radar, sonar, bazar, qbittorrent, watchtower, and gluetun (all running in an Ubuntu server with docker). I also have an lxc container with pihole running on it, though it’s just my backup for that. Lastly I have a Win10 VM that I use for software that doesn’t play nicely with the rest of my devices.

It’s a great little box, mines the micro version and its served me well for 6 months now. All this with just 16gb of ram has been wonderful.

yeah, that setup should handle your needs just fine. for a media server and nas, something like unraid or freenas would work well. as for the ssd, using it as a boot drive is a good call. upgrading the ram would definitely be a smart move.

One extra thing to bare in mind is these use a proprietary dell power connector on the mother board and also won't boot without the front IO connected. This makes it annoying to case swap and PSU upgrade if you want to turn it into a NAS with a bunch of drive bays.

You can get adapters to make it work but is still a bit of a pain.

I'd put more RAM in it but it would be a good start