I've run mine as a VM for several years now. I haven't noticed any appreciable impact on performance vs bare metal. I am able to max out my 1000/40 WAN.
That being said, the platform you use to virtualize it on will have an impact. I am running mine on a 3 node proxmox cluster with 10gig networking and SSD backed Ceph storage, so my benchmarks for performance grossly outweigh what my WAN bandwidth can accommodate.
Audiobookshelf is what your wanting then. It does exactly that, and even has a mobile client.
I have one, and I love it. It bridges my large UPS and the mains power, so that if either one of those fail, then things keep running. I have it on mains in case something kicks up too high and overloads the UPS.
This is very similar to how I run mine, except that I use Ceph instead of ZFS. Nightly backups of the CephFS data with Duplicati, followed by staggered nightly backups for all VMs and containers to a PBS VM on a the NAS. File backups from unraid get sent up to CrashPlan.
Slightly fewer retention points to cut down on overall storage, and a similar test pattern.
Yes, current sysadmin.
They really aren't that much more expensive than a high end smart TV. I've been seeing them at about $10(US) per inch. So a 60 inch TV is roughly $600(US). But I guess it all depends on availability of them in your local market.
If you are looking for a "dumb" TV, check out models that are for "digital signage" like the Samsung BEC-H series. They are as dumb as you can get while still buying new.
My 10G is far from saturated, but I do try and keep things using RAM where possible. I figure that with 100gb of DDR4 in my main server, that should be able to provide enough speed for a 10G link.
I've got ceph running on Intel Enterprise SSDs, so they are pretty quick.
I also tried running ceph on 1G. I found it unreliable as well.
I've got a 3 node Proxmox/ceph cluster with 10G, plus a separate Nas. They are all rack mount with dual PSU. Add in the necessary switching, and my average load is about 800w. Throw my desktop (also on 10G) into the mix and it runs 1.1kw.
That's roughly $50-60 extra in electricity costs for me monthly.
I expose quite a few services to the web, so having that extra layer of protection is nice. And it allows me to control what leaves my network from an application perspective, not just TCP/UDP
ZenArmor. It integrates nicely with Opnsense and offers all of the features that I was looking for.
I run a pretty hefty home lab, so my costs are fairly high compared to some.
Overall: $155/mo
I'm a Sysadmin, so my names are purely functional:
host-pmx-01 through 03, my 3 node Proxmox cluster
vm-[SERVICE], optional 01-03 if needed
ct-[SERVICE], for LXC containers
It makes it easy to reference things via DNS for service discovery.