Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
Yep, I think there’s sound arguments for separating out your storage (NAS) and network (router/DNS/PiHole) infrastructure. After that, whatever suits your purpose. I virtualise all my serious services on one machine under Proxmox (mostly for ease of snapshots) then have another machine for things I’m fiddling with, usually again under Proxmox so they are easy to move to production when I’m happy with them.
Makes sense. I would probably recommend more infrastructure-as-code workflows over snapshots, like ArgoCD or docker-compose, as git commits are simpler than VM snapshots. But both ways work.