[mysteria]

If you're looking at HCI Proxmox is amazing for homelabbing, with a 3 node cluster or 2 nodes with a qdevice. I use PBS for automated backups and RAIDZ and while there's quite a learning curve and initial setup time actual cluster maintainance is pretty hands off.

With enterprise gear it becomes outdated and then you replace it at your leisure, whereas with consumer equipment it dies so you need to replace it. The disvantage of that is the noise and power consumption so it's a tradeoff you need to consider.

[Kerbonut]

I've heard of Proxmox before, will definitely check it out! What is PBS? I have RAIDZ but have not explored backup options just yet.

[mysteria]

PBS is the Proxmox Backup Server, basically it does differential backups of your VMs, integrity checks, and allows you to back up to multiple different servers. Proxmox does have a basic backup system that can save the VM images to disk though but I typically recommend the full PBS if you're building a cluster.

One interesting thing you can do is run PBS as a giant VM and back up or migrate the whole thing, just like you can run a small NAS as a VM as well.