I don’t see why you’d want separate clusters, just stick em all in one.

2-3 second hand small form factor PC’s running Proxmox, cheap 2 bay Synology NAS for backups.

Yeah but Vince is a dinosaur. I’ve heard he’s still running OpenVPN. Eeeww.

16gb is fine, but you’d probably want to stick with containers. I had an S12 Pro with 32gb working just fine.

I run a wireshark server, with the client installed on family members laptops/desktops to auto connect.

I then just connect from my desktop to wireshark and can connect to their devices.