I agree, but it’s clear that OP doesn’t want a real solution, because those apparently are boring. Instead, they want to try something new. NVMe/TCP is something new. And it still allows for having VMs on one system and storage on another, so it’s not entirely off topic.

If you want to try something that’s quite new and mostly unexplored, look into NVMe over TCP. I really like the concept, but it appears to be too new to be production ready. Might be a good fit for your adventurous endeavors.

Can’t go wrong with Proxmox. Though, I would recommend thinking about how you want to integrate Storage here. For most of the VMs you’re planning on running now that’s probably not a huge issue currently, but in the long run you’ll want to also replace Google Drive, Photos and Netflix And then you wish you’d thought about storage earlier.

Consider whether you want to deploy a separate NAS box (I can recommend TrueNAS) and do network storage in these cases (and how exactly that’s going to look like), or if you want to put it all on your Proxmox system and maybe run TrueNAS as a VM.

Kudos on the project! I often thought about building something similar myself, because I wasn’t happy with what’s out there. Everything is so complicated to set up and way too oversized for a simple log collection service, or the UI is just bad and super unintuitive for no reason. Glad you’re brining some new wind into the space.

MikroTik is very affordable and can be configured quite extensively.