I am trying to plan my home lab to satisfy two different needs:

1. I want a stable environment where I will put a relatively expensive NAS and maybe some other Zima boards.
2. I also want to try new versions and configurations in an env where I can break stuff BEFORE trying things on my Production environment. I would also like to use that environment to try other things like playing with Kubernetes, Docker, Iceberg, etc. I am a backend software engineer so this is very useful to me. Besides being fun.

So, I am just trying to gather ideas on how to configure this both in terms of software and hardware.