Hey, I got lucky and someone said he will buy me a machine. But since I already have a good notebook for my actual webdev work, maybe I should set up a homelab for fun and semi-professional stuff.

But I have no deep knowledge of proper hardware.

tldr: Is this hardware combination stupid or ok in general for running vSphere8?

I tried to read a lot, but I still wanted to ask you all, if there are some major flaws/oversights with what is clicked together here.
What I would use it for:

• learning and running vSphere 8/esxi
• simulating multiple Windows Clients, Windows Networks with AD, and some other VMs to learn and apply some security stuff. Did lots of Cybersecurity CTFs but now I think I should do something “real”.
• learn and setup pipelines for CI/CD and get more proficient with things like terraform, ansible, etc. in more complex environment
• this machine would not need to run 24/7

-- Hardware –

Some things here are very unspecific. That is because I kinda need to get everything from one shop and this german shop seems accessible. They also claim to check your order for compatibility before purchase: link to shop
It may be more pricey and I don’t want to waste money but until now this is not a deal breaker.

Plattform: Dell PowerEdge R730

• 8xLFF 3.5"
• 2U
• Intel Socket R3 (LGA 2011-3)
• 2 CPU Slots
• 24 DIMM-Slots, max. 2.400 MT/s

Processor: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2698v4 (2.2 GHz/20-core/50MB/135 W)

There is no particular reason for this CPU besides the mentioned 20 cores and as far as I understood is has to be v4 for vSphere8. This is the only result on vmware vSphere8 compatibility: link

I found some comments that said E5-2695v4 would be better and cheaper but I could not find it in a shop.

Memory: 4x 32 GB DDR4 RAM

128 GB seems to be quite a lot for now.

Drives:

• 2x Dell 400GB 3.5" SATA 6G Mixed Use SSD
• 2x Dell 8TB 7.2k 3,5" SATA 6G HDD

Probably 2x RAID1. I figured I could use 3.5" to 2.5" adapters if i really need 2.5" drives later on.

PSU: 1x Dell 750 W AC Hot Plug Power Supply

Options are: 495W, 750W or 1100W. 750W seemed to be the reasonable middle

Host-Bus-Adapter: none

Do I really need an HBA in the beginning?

RAID Controller: Dell PERC H730

I do not really need RAID, but I thought I would need either a HBA or a RAID Controller?

PCIe Network Adapter: Dell Intel Ethernet I350-T4 4x1000Base-T

From the 6 adapters I can choose, this seems to be the most basic one with 4 slots. Only information I could online find was “dont buy the fake ones” which I think wont be the case.

Network Daughter Card: none

Proper Networking has to come later, so i skipped this for now.

It would help me a lot if you can give me some advice if this setup is kinda reasonable or if I need to dive into hardware way deeper.

Ultimately I am more interested in the virtualization and software side of this all, but I know I cant skip the hardware :)