Just got a great deal on a Dell Precision 3420 with a Xeon E3 1270v6. It has 4GB of ram but I intend to upgrade it soon to at least 16gb.
If running VMs and containers, how far could I realistically go with 4C8T from 2017? I was thinking of at least running OPNsense with a new network card as well as maybe TrueNAS, but I’m not sure if I could realistically run more, like a Plex server for a few people and myself.
You will likely hit the RAM limit (64GB) before you run out of processing power for most “normal” VM use cases. You should easily be able to run a dozen or so VMs.