I recently discovered /r/homelab and I found it extremely confusing. People are throwing thousands of dollars and thousands of watts at servers that could power a medium-sized business and then putting them in their basements and running local DNS servers, a NAS and maybe a mail server handling personal mail. Most of the compute power is spent reinstalling various virtualization technologies over and over again and repeatedly backing up a bunch of torrented movies and music without compression or dedup to flex their 30T NAS.
Couldn't say for sure, I've noticed similar. I feel like I have to be overlooking something... even though I may appear to be in the same wasteful-spending boat.
Redundancy is an easy way to spend a ton of cash poorly, but if done well I recommend it for anyone!
The virtualization aspect for example, that's just a bullet-point for how I use KVM and some of the fancier gear to prove out certain implementations... then automate using them. Lately, SR-IOV.
For those like me, it's often fairly practical but the trivial stuff may be what gets shared
What am I missing?