[crapple8430]

A powerful enough machine (usually limited by RAM, not CPU) will let you run a hypervisor OS like Proxmox which helps a lot with making things secure and flexible. You might also want to have RAID, ECC memory. It quickly starts to make sense to build a proper home server rather than cobbling together a bunch of low end hardware. The tipping point is probably when you want more than 1-2 hard drives worth of storage.

[apexalpha]

If you run everything on Linux you don't need VMs.

What are you putting in the VM, another Linux kernel? Why? Yeah then you need to take into account between 4GB and ~ 8GB of extra ram per VM.

I don't have RAID though I do backup to my NAS at my parents'.

But honestly a NVMe drive is basically like a CPU: it's either dead on arrival or it will just run forever.

[Saris]

The average Linux VM I run is around 50-100MB of RAM usage. Not actually that much more than an LXC container.

There are some use cases for a VM over a container, sometimes you want better isolation (my public facing webserver runs in one), or a different OS for some reason (I run an OSX VM because its the only way to test a site in Safari).

[notarget137]

Backing up entire VMs with all the configuration in case an update breaks something or just bricks your server is a smart idea aswell as running stuff in containers. Also, 4GB per VM? Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not avaliable on linux.

[63stack]

I'm also going to leave my personal opinion;

You don't need ECC

You absolutely don't need proxmox, containers are good enough

It does not quickly make sense to build a proper home server

Raid1 or raid6 makes sense, but it's absolutely not a tipping point.