I went the "prosumer" route too. Threadripper maxed with 256G memory.
It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru.
This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.
Why ESXi just out of curiousity? Seems like most businesses I work with are ripping it out (some with glee) and going acropolis/kubevirt/QEMU or cloud.
* Best support for PCIe passthrough, easily toggle PCIe devices from UI without reboot.
* Best networking with virtual distrubuted switches - more intuitive to manage and use
* vSAN integration with k8s for block volumes is great, including volume snapshots. Also supports RWX (nfs) volumes
* vSphere api is a first class citizen with cloud native tooling such as terraform, ansible and packer. It also has a great golang-based cli via govc.
With all that said I actually still experiment with kvm (kubevirt, harvester etc) by running it nested inside esxi which works exactly how you would expect. Much prefer vSphere as the base of my lab though.
For really modern stuff sure, but a lot of enterprises are not using containers, they're still Hyper-V or VMware based. The only reason to go Hyper-V is because it's cheaper, so if you can use ESXi free... you choose ESXi.
ESXi remains one of the most ridiculously and stupidly stable platforms of all time. Someday someone will find an ESXi host with a twenty year uptime. Not because you should, but because it can.
It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru.
This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.