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?
This is the way.
There’s nothing worse than finding your DNS/DHCP has gone down and it’s a VM / container running inside a server that can’t start because it doesn’t have an IP address and you can’t resolve names to get the thing started.
Break things down into chunks that make sense - to you.
I have dedicated (low power) hardware for the interweb firewall / DHCP / core network stuff.
I have a NAS for storage with all the backups / reinstall images on (so I can rebuild the firewall if there’s no internet, for example)
Then I have everything else in a single server.
Sources: a house fire, water leak & many hardware failures & borked upgrades over many decades.