For it/security related homelabs, do you often use many vms with little workloads or a few vms with heavy workloads. I'm currently trying to pick between a i5-8700 and i7-9700 cpu for a new homelab setup. Thank you.

Title. I'm going to be spinning up multiple vm's and was considering buying this dell optiplex 5060 sff. I do plan on eventually maxing out the ram and upgrading to a 1tb hard drive. Is it worth the buy?

For context, I'm a computer science student learning IT on the side and am currently on the search for a decent mini pc to get started with learning sysadmin related tasks. So spinning up vm's and learning active directory, networking, some cli and powershell scripting, etc, etc. Is this mini pc a good starting point in terms of it's CPU to which I can eventually upgrade the ram and hard disk space.

I'm also on the fence about selling my MBP and using those funds (about 1k usd) to buy a decent spec'd thinkpad or a dell latitude. Would this be a better idea or would I be utilizing a company laptop anyway? Any laptop suggestions will also be appreciated. Thank You.