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While rather easy to do, Synology provides so much more “out of the box”. My own NAS ran well on Debian 10 for a few years, until I started getting random disconnects on drives and various other “stability” issues. Synology costs more up front, but after initial configuration it’s more or less just a box in the corner you forget about. Mine just sits there, automatically installing software updates whenever they’re available.

Does your synology utilize BTRFS? If so, what is your experience with it? I'm currently using a FreeNAS box that runs on ZFS that has been very reliable for me over the years. I can't really see giving up the power/reliability of ZFS to move to a synology setup, but I like to keep tabs on BTRFS progress.

Not op but I have several Synology NASen using Btrfs volumes with no issues that I can recall in the past six years. I’ve replaced all of the drives twice to increase available storage and that’s it. The two I have at home are both set to autoupdate and do monthly disk scrubbing—they automatically email after scrubbing with any issues. They’re really pretty hands off devices overall.

Thanks for the advice about the NAS. Perhaps it's best to leave critical data and backups to a professional product.

As for the firewall, I had a Ubiquiti Security Gateway for a while and it worked great. Not sure how it compares to the UniFi Dream Machine, however. The only reason I made a custom firewall is because I wanted to try and learn a bit about firewalls and routing in general. And, since my own device has worked well for me so far, I haven't bothered to replace it.

Be careful, I made a switch from OPNsense to the UDM recently and it’s pretty half baked. Some menus crash 100% of the time, some features are missing randomly (you can’t use the UDM as a DNS server) Just weird little things. They are in the middle of a big transition, so I’m guessing it has to do with that.

Yeah I'm right here as well. I built my own NAS first with FreeNAS and had enough issues with it that I eventually caved and I'm now three Synologys deep into my home lab environment, couldn't be happier.

Running FreeNAS gives you a lot more flexibility and can be just as easy to maintain.

Why proxmox over ESXi?

Not the GP, but as an ESXi user considering converting to Proxmox, there are a number of limitations on the free ESXi that can be annoying, largely around the non-standard and generally poorly supported tooling required to manage the platform unless you have a paid vCentre instance.

I can't easily create new VMs, create snapshotted/linked clones, and I can't easily pull out CPU/RAM/disk utilisation information from ESXi for the hypervisor and all VMs to store in a time series database for monitoring/alerting purposes.

There's also a tonne of additional features in Proxmox that requires additional licensing for ESXi (and yes, I am aware of the VMUG EE licensing making a lot of that a lot more affordable)

Proxmox ultimately being Debian based gives a lot more flexibility in that regard. It's also a potential weakness as a result, depending on perspective.

Thanks appreciate the response. Wasn’t aware of proxmox gonna do some more research!