

It’s hard to say what is best. It comes down to what you’re trying to achieve. For example Tailscale and Wireguard are both VPN-s, but the purpose of those two is to set up your own personal VPN so that you could securely access devices and services that are available only in your personal VPN. The difference between Tailscale and Wireguard is basically the monetary cost of having an easy setup vs the complexity of setting it up yourself. Wireguard is an open source protocol and software that allows you to set up your own VPN if you have the technical know-how how to set it up. Tailscale is built ontop of Wireguard so at its core it does what Wireguard does, but it offers easier setup at the cost of asking for money if your network starts expanding beyond the free tier.
And then there’s “VPN” which are actually VPN service providers. Some of them allow setting up your own personal VPN but more often than not they offer VPN tunneling where you securely connect your device to their VPN server to route your traffic through their servers. The purpose of that is to hide your online activity. For example if your country really cracks down on illegal torrents you pretty much have to torrent through a VPN. And another purpose is to circumvent regional laws or trademarks. For example VPN usage in the UK went up in response to the Online Safety Act because a VPN lets you circumvent those laws. And another example is if a streaming service doesn’t offer a show in your country but offers it in another country and your VPN provider has a server there you can tunnel yourself into that server and you get to see your show because technically you’re in that country.
Depending on what you’re planning on doing with your home server you might need both kind of “VPN”.
And why can’t university IT set up the server? No offense but you’re a nobody asking us, also nobodies, how to set up some sort of a funky server on the university network, meanwhile the university pays people to do this for a living.
Where will the server actually be? Will it be in a secure location where only authorized personnel can physically access the machine or will it be behind the trash can in the cafeteria where anyone can access it?
Since you will lose access to it once it’s set up who will monitor the system? Who turns it on in case it somehow gets shut down? Who sets up backups and does rollbacks if something breaks?
What happens to the hardware when research project is over?
To me it all smells like something the IT department should set up. They already know the best practices. They also know whatever security guidelines they need to follow. They will have monitoring systems in place so they could admin the system instead of leaving it without an actual administrator. And they’re probably the ones decommissioning the hardware when the research project is over.
My suggestion is to leave it to the people who are getting paid to do this. It’s one thing to know how to set up a home server on your home network, it’s a different thing to set up a server on an enterprise network.