Understood that general advice is not to run a homelab on a laptop. But if I were to go down the path of a laptop homelab and went out to buy a new laptop for the sole purpose of using it as a homelab, are there any suggestions for makes/models etc? I’m expecting to need about 64gb ram and 1tb storage. I’m just not sure on processor. Not bothered about the quality of the display or GPU. Many thanks
For your original question: I would not bother with a CPU with less than 6 physical cores. 4 laptop cores might work, but you can’t upgrade them.
Laptops have some advantages and if you already have one it is a valid alternative, but I would not bother buying a new laptop.
Advantages are built in battery as UPS, keyboard and display, but upgrading is very limited. If it has an additional dedicated GPU you might even forward that to a VM.
32GB ram should work, but with 64GB you will have more possibilities. Some laptops are limited in functionality, but new ones should have the necessary virtualization options. With 6+ physical cores modern laptops have some great virtualization potential, but with modern big/little core Intel CPUs virtualization might need some additional tweaking.
Cooling wise it might be worth looking for a model that doesn’t push air out in front of the opened display. If you store it closed the limited cooling can cost performance.
Thunderbolt is a good but expensive way to add new hardware like 10G networking or fast external storage.
Personally I extended my lab with an old Dell Precision 7540 workstation laptop, which is really great but not cheap.