I'm currently running a ryzen 7 5700g with 32gb ddr4 ram on an Asus prime b450m-a board, no GPU obviously. I've had this up and running for almost a year but other than that this is all new to me. It's running proxmox with a Samsung 1tb m.2 drive handling the VM's and proxmox.
VM's currently include
Windows 10 to run blue iris with a limited number of POE cameras at my house. There is a 4tb WD purple HDD handling only the recorded video.
Pi hole
Truenas Scale running as a nas on the system that backs up the computers around the house regularly. It has two 4tb HGST HDD in raid 1.
Home assistant
This leaves me with 1 core not assigned and limited RAM. While I plan to add another 32gb of matching RAM, I'm doing the cheap thing and waiting for it to go on sale.
My questions comes from looking around on AliExpress during there 11.11 sale right now. I'd like to have a few more resources to mess around with. Would like to mess around with Linux, have been reading up on pfsense in a VM etc. Is switching to a e5 cpu a stupid idea? Nothing crazy but maybe something like a 2640, 50, 60 v4? Obviously this causes me to also purchase a new MB but I'm wondering if I really need this or if I'm just looking to spend money haha. I know my power consumption would go up and I worry about the core performance when it comes to things blue iris.
Thanks
You could set up monitoring of the VMs & host and determine if you have, or are approaching, a performance bottleneck. Also, if you do want increase capacity, it would be better adding a second node, so you have some redundancy in your lab.