I've got a few questions and would like some input and suggestions from anyone with experience.
I would like to build a home lab where I can play with different server level 'stuff'. Stuff like a NAS, personal cloud, web servers, game servers, a place to spin up VMs for whatever I feel like looking into, security camera network, I would also like to build my own router with PFSense, VLANs etc. I've started messing with VM's on my main machine and it's peaked my interest in trying a bunch of different stuff. I would prefer to not have all that running on my main machine. I see a bunch of videos that are like 'Build a NAS on a Raspberry Pi' and I feel like that's more of a novelty than something people actually use day to day...but I could be wrong.
My questions as of right now:
Should I look into used server grade hardware right off the bat? I don't really expect/need 99.99999% uptime. This is more for fun/learning than for highly valuable operations/data storage.
Can I run all of these various 'tasks' on one physical box(depending on hardware obviously) or should I be looking into a specific appliance for the NAS itself and another one for the security cameras? I feel like I could run those things on the same hardware in separate VM's...I feel like the Router should be it's own hardware though. Not 100% sure on that either...
I have a few workstation level computers with old but quality hardware in them, I know I could just hook those up, but I've never really done any work on server grade hardware so I'm not sure what I would be missing.
Please feel free to drop any knowledge or lessons learned from setting up your own home labs. Background, I'm a c#/ASP.NET/JS/React/etc developer that's interested in getting into more networking/system admin/security stuff.