My needs are pretty similar to yours and I’ve recently moved back to using hypervisors after running everything from Debian to Arch to NixOS bare-metal over the last decade or so. It’s so easy to bring-up/tear-down environments, which is great for testing things and pretty much the whole point of a homelab. I’ve got a few VMs + one LXC running on Proxmox with some headroom on a 6th gen i7, you should be fine resource wise tbh. Worth mentioning that you’ll most likely need to passthrough your drives to the guest VM which is not supported via the webUI, but the config is documented on their wiki.

Overall, I’m happy with this setup and loving CoreOS as a base-OS for VMs and rootless podman containers for applications.

I’d take those tens of milliseconds. That shit scales and I’ve seen infra in the scale of millions more-or-less glued together by shell scripts and coreutils/busybox.

Similar service, just with more built-in features than pihole, namely supporting DoH/DoT.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki/Comparison