Hi all

For the last 10 or so years, I have been running rack mount servers in my homelab with hardware RAID and ESXI.

Because of noise space power etc, I was planning to migrate to a single ATX box. This means id likely be running 13/14th Gen Intel.

Given ESXIs lack of support for software raid and efficiency cores, I feel its finally time to move to an alternative. A good 75% of my workload at this point is containerized, but I do still need a handful of VMs. Id also really like NVME RAID 1 if possible.

Im not against ZFS, but I have ZERO hands on experience with it so not sure if id want to go all in with no prior experience. I have tried proxmox before and find the UI hateful, so id rather steer clear.

What would be my best option other than rawdog Debian + MD raid?