I have a stack of lenovo m93s & M900s from when our hospital was bought out by a larger one. Installed opensuse on a couple to act as web/app servers for dinking around with.
My storage server is an old Ryzen desktop someone was going to recycle with a bunch (24TB) of extra drives added. Opensuse as well.
I usually just do bare metal because that is how I was taught back in the day, and since they're only accessible internally it doesn't make much of a difference security wise.
At my first job/internship it was fish names (they were dev/qa servers so wiped almost daily): Crappie, Bluegill, Walleye, Marlin, etc.
Current job is medical so it's all professional (i.e gr01sec02, gr02sccm01)
At home I've got a couple of naming schemes for different device types.:
Phones: i-telleuwat(last 4 of the number)
PCs and Media centers: playon(last octet of the IP)
Servers:gimme(service thats hosted)