To make it simple, since you already have the hardware, I would suggest setting up the server as a VM Host to allow for experimentation with little effort. VMw

To make it simple, since you already have the hardware, I would suggest setting up the server as a VM Host to allow for experimentation with little effort. VMware vSphere Hypervisor, Proxmox, or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 are all free options. It makes it easy to experiment with the above in parallel. My current VM Host has * One VM as a docker host (turtles all the way down) for development tools. Build server, bug tracker, private artifact repo (Sonatype Nexus). * 3 VMs as a Kubernetes cluster for experimentation Building a NAS is the only thing that would take significant effort and is a project unto itself. Unless you have a strong desire to experiment with failure modes (network dropping out, killing iSCSI, online VM fail over), stick to a single box.