A small homelab port shortage reminded me that physical port count, topology, and device capabilities are different problems, and that hardware purchases should come after understanding the path.
Separating storage from application compute forced me to define ownership, permissions, failure boundaries, and recovery instead of treating shared disks as a transparent dependency.
Separating application compute from authoritative storage made my homelab easier to rebuild, troubleshoot, and change without pretending a second machine is automatic redundancy.