Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
The mini PC crowd will inevitably come in and shit on anything bigger than a matchbox that uses more than 1w.
They're not 100% wrong: power consumption is a factor but there's also a time and a place for rack servers. That time and place is when you have (or are looking to get) a rack and are looking for rock solid reliable hardware with lots of cores and hotswap storage bays, and running game servers is definitely somewhere the low core counts of mini PCs falls down.
That said, in 2023 it's probably not worth spending money on anything older than an E5 v4.
As someone with absolutely no idea what the fk is going on when it comes to servers, can you explain why stuff older than E5 isn’t worth it?
The machine OP linked has E5 v1 CPUs, which are a 12 year old Sandy Bridge-EP chip that's hugely power inefficient by modern standards and tops out at 12 cores per socket. E5 v4 would be Broadwell-EP, which is still 9 years old but benefited from 3 more generations of PPC and efficiency enhancements and tops out at 24 cores per socket.
IMO, that's as far back as you can go in search of cheap and cheerful hardware without shooting yourself in the foot on performance and efficiency.