Just yesterday I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about this. I have an ancient QNAP plus a slightly less ancient NUC running PiHole, Wireguard and other services. Both need replaced, so why not combine them?

I don't know much about ZFS, but it sounds like I need to learn. Docker may have conquered the world, but I plan to stay with LXD for services.

The one thing I take issue with: an appliance like this runs 24/7. It should be low power and fanless. A processor like the N100 seems like the obvious choice.

I run zfs as the storage pool for my incus (next lxd) services. It is the ideal fit. Here is a list:

- Instant, zero-copy container cloning from images via Copy-on-Write. If you boot a new image like the existing ones it's seconds.

- Atomic, millisecond-level instance snapshots regardless of storage size

- Block-level container migration using native 'zfs send' and 'zfs receive', very short command lines and seems to work perfectly.

- Granular dataset nesting (every instance, image, and custom volume gets its own ZFS dataset). You can see every filesystem even on the host.

- Transparent, inline data compression (LZ4/ZSTD) enabled automatically per dataset. For services that don't change much, you might as well use a compressed image to make them even smaller.

- Mirroring / Raid

- Sub-volume sharing and direct management via native ZFS administration tools. If my home directory has a build area and a million files, I can just save time and put my home, pre cooked into a new machine and not copy or even rebuild on my new machine.

- Dedup keeps blocks with the same data as a reference. This costs a lot of memory and has not saved much for me as a lot of my images are similar and already shared I think, but it's cool.

It also surprised me that the author said "4 Cores, Xeon Server CPU can be had for cheap".

But the specs also said ECC RAM and I don't think the N100 supports that.