Agreed that homelab load is generally small compared to a company’s (though an initial Plex cataloging run will happily max out as many cores as you give it for days).

In the professional environment I mentioned, I think we had somewhere close to 500 physical servers across 3 DCs. They were all Dell Blades, and nothing was virtualized. I initially thought that latter bit was silly, but then I saw that no, they’d pretty well matched compute to load. If needs grew, we’d get another Blade racked.

We could not tolerate unplanned downtime (or rather, our customers couldn’t), but we did have a weekly 3-hour maintenance window, which was SO NICE. It was only a partial outage for customers, and even then, usually only a subset of them at a time. Man, that makes things easier, though.

They were also hybrid AWS, and while I was there, we spun up an entirely new “DC” in a region we didn’t have a physical one. More or less lift-and-shift, except for managed Kafka, and then later EKS.