I have an HP DL380 Gen8 and then a PC I bought from the local university and use as a server.
My DL380 runs ESXi. My PC runs Ubuntu on bare metal.
All of my apps are either fully VM-based (Home Assistant OS) or run in containers. Containers are far easier to build, upgrade, and migrate, and also make file management a lot easier.
I use Docker Compose. No Swarm or Kubernetes at this point.
Hopefully this is at least a good start! Let me know if you have any questions.