Input regarding HW for Homelab

[Dwid]

In the process of setting up a home lab with Proxmox VE and was hoping for some input regarding HW recommendation.
I have the option of buying 1 or 2 HP SSFs with I5-9500 CPU, or or 1PC with i5-13500. What would be most beneficial for a lab, 2 older PCs or 1 newer with the additional power that the 13.th would provide? The new 13.th gen is roughly 20% cheaper than 2 older PC.
Looking for what will provide most value and possibilities in the lab setup.

/Dwid

 

[Dunuin]

Depends on how much you care about the availability of your services.
Keep in mind that you need 3 or more machines for a cluster (either 2 PVE nodes + qdevice or 3 PVE nodes). With only 2 nodes I wouldn't cluster them. With 2 separated PVE nodes you could let them back up each other and when then one of them fails, you got a recent local backup of the failed guests so you could restore them so that at least your most imporant guests can continue running on the remaining PVE server.

If you only got a single PVE server and there is a problem, you might be really screwed if your PVE server won't work for a week and you really rely on it because it is for example working as your password manager, NAS, router and so on.
But running a single newer and more powerful server might be way cheaper on the long run because of the electricity savings and waranty.

So it really depends on how much you care about redundancy/downtime.