>1L form factors (incl. Mac Mini, NUCs) are ideal home servers at this point when you need much more power than a Raspberry Pi provides.
A Synology or a HPE MicroServer might be better since you can use it for storage as well without external HDDs.
A Synology or a HPE MicroServer might be better since you can use it for storage as well without external HDDs.
Compact storage devices make tradeoffs, which may or may not fit your needs, e.g. flash/SSD tier, 10GbE/2.5GbE NICs, memory, TPMs, low-power vs. cores. External storage offers more flexibility, which will increase as USB4/Thunderbolt become widely available and fall in price. For now, USB 3.2 JBOD with ZFS is workable with external enclosures, https://oyendigital.com/multi-bay-storage
Wish there was a NUC-sized device with an LSI SATA controller and external connector. If we're lucky, the https://frame.work "modular laptop" approach will be adapted to compact desktops based on laptop chipsets.
The virtualization server is one of many things that connects to it.
There are benefits to having the storage and the virtualization servers separate, mostly that there's no single point of failure.
I'd prefer a newer generation Zen CPU, but AMD doesn't currently have a recent embedded-application CPU with anything approaching that low a TDP.
Something like an Intel Atom C3758 would be the Intel comparison point, but the EPYC Embedded uses a bit less power at idle (the base clocks of the C3758 are higher), and the EPYC Embedded's ability to turbo means it has more headroom when required for only about 5W additional power draw. Moreover, the EPYC Embedded has about 170% more overall CPU performance than the Atom.