Have a clear plan and build towards a specific idea, rather than just building for the sake of it being cool. One is cost effective. One is expensive.
Start somewhere and then pivot. We don't know what we don't know. working towards idea requires frame of reference
Choose an operating system and stick with it until you have a good reason to switch.
why? do all of them and try to get on each vm between each other within network, get some kali and parrot try to probe them with script kiddie tools too.
If someone tells you that the server noise is tolerable, it's too loud. Don't buy it. Living next to an airport is more peaceful than living next to a loud server.
Basements? Garages? this one is debatable and decent enterprise experience is loud otherwise you're building some whitebox with custom coolers or getting those nucs that are not compute dense
If someone tells you a switch's noise is okay, go for the fanless alternative and place it in an open or cooled rack.
good luck with 40gbe and fiber finding fanless
If you are new, buy a NUC.
If you are really new, buy a mac mini.
get a $5 a month nanode and experiment "homelab". very new = you use your laptop\pc until you can't use it no more because of all the bloat from experiments
Plenty of 730 https://i.imgur.com/6kyoUdw.png which is WAY better than what OP is looking at. No listings I see currently for dell r740 of that configuration. BUT hear me out. Cisco C240M5 https://i.imgur.com/zgjAVMJ.png don't get too boxed into small company footprint with Dell and HP that due to demand from homelabber sysadmins will be priced higher. Cisco CIMC is hella good and free + Cisco Intersight cloud management for your server
why sky is blue? why water wet? Some things are better to research yourself before just asking questions
Overpriced for R720. At that price you can get 730 or even 740 which will be more compute dense and have ddr4 memory.
Did you Google or ask chat gpt about risks of letting bad actors brute force or potentially use some zero day with some crazy url that can let them encrypt all your family pictures and other data? If you want to access from outside do that thru some reverse proxy like find proxy manager or traefik
Once you try Bitwarden you will really ask yourself why’d have you paid for last pass. And their app on a phone works with self hosted instance as long as it is exposed to world. Last pass broke my mfa that totally borked webui and chrome extension for me. As soon as I got password export I deleted my last pass account. Took them 2 fix to fix it
Now grab cis benchmark for windows and see what is considered secure setup
Out of 6 Cisco servers 3 have auto power on at 7am and auto shutdown at 11 pm. Other 3 are 24/7