I’m sure there’s been a post like this already, but I am currently trying to find ways to practice stuff at home while not breaking the bank. I am using cisco Packet tracer for testing and playing around and I’ve been thinking about buy a Raspberry Pi or two. I’m just curious if there is anything in addition I could do until I have more money to but some nicer stuff.
You can usually find good rack mount servers used on like eBay for cheap. I’ve gotten two over the years. Both were good and still running to this day.
Usually you can pick them up at almost any price range. But they tend to start around $500 or so. And they are normal x86 processors usually older xeons. And then with that you can run something like proxmox. And get a decent number of cores.
Or. Alternatively. You can also pick up a tiny mini pc with like a ryzen chip that might have like 8 cores and 16 threads for only like $300 or so. I use one of these as my daughters computer and I am endlessly impressed. Like no power draw. Basically silent. And overall very inexpensive.
Raspberry pie are great. But the arm architecture can present challenges sometimes.