Self hosted infra suggestions

Hi, currently running a couple of on-prem stand-alone npm (on a VM) instances, just for dev and testing. Now got to a stage where we want to deploy a on-prem prodcution setup, which would run various simultanious workflows, some of whihc might be quite resource intensive (MD5, Audio / Video analysis, etc), so multi-node is required. As we come from a hypervisor / container background, with no Kubernetes experience, what would be the recomeneded infrastructure, setup? 2 or 3 bare-metal servers, Docker swarm? Any insight, experience, suggestions would be greatley appreciated.