I’m doing everything you list and quite a bit more on a QNAP with a Celeron J4125. A fraction of the cpu performance you’ll have, yet very capable of all the tasks I ask of it. 16gb of memory is a good starting point I think.

What does your build come out at?

“Just” some highly specific VM settings, in the end. I don’t know much about that, and terms like qemu don’t mean anything to me so I followed blog posts until it worked. (This one and maybe this one, I think.) It’s possible that it is actually trivial.

It’s been a while, but I can look up what I have when you need it. Feel free to ping me!

Yes, it was exactly that: Once I got the NICs set up the way I wanted them it was a breeze and everything just works. And I really like that I made every part work myself, no magic. I learned a lot, and wouldn’t have had I relied on Proxmox fiddling with the right parts for me.

I was in a similar spot not too long ago, setting up a firewall and general network box. I was going to go with Proxmox but a fellow Lemmy guy strongly advocated for Incus on top of vanilla Debian. I was intrigued and ended up going for it. Learned a lot about networking with systemd (bridging, IP assignment and so on) for things I could have gotten for free in Proxmox (literally a few clicks), and had to fight Incus to work with a FreeBSD VM for Opnsense, but I love the setup now. Pure debian with a few Incus VMs and Docker inside of those as needed. So clean!