

My needs are pretty similar to yours and I’ve recently moved back to using hypervisors after running everything from Debian to Arch to NixOS bare-metal over the last decade or so. It’s so easy to bring-up/tear-down environments, which is great for testing things and pretty much the whole point of a homelab. I’ve got a few VMs + one LXC running on Proxmox with some headroom on a 6th gen i7, you should be fine resource wise tbh. Worth mentioning that you’ll most likely need to passthrough your drives to the guest VM which is not supported via the webUI, but the config is documented on their wiki.
Overall, I’m happy with this setup and loving CoreOS as a base-OS for VMs and rootless podman containers for applications.
This was the only thing keeping me on chrome at work. Tab groups are so nice for keeping resources related to specific projects together, especially if you’re juggling several features/fixes at the same time.