Ubiquiti unifi Protect makes it very easy. Buy a unifi protect doorbell and cloud key gen2+ (your network video recorder).

E-waste

Everything at my house has a TLD named after the road I live on (a founding father last name). Everything at my offsite at my dads house uses TLD named after the road he lives on (a woman’s first name).

It’s both arbitrary and practical. A number systems exist at both such as proxmox. truenas. pihole. plex. So it’s a good way to tell them appart without having to differentiate them in the domain name.

R710 is e-waste. Try to get at least like a r730 with ddr4 ram. An r720 is still usable, but getting long in the tooth and only ddr3.

The hardware controller bit is something i do. So I run Proxmox. I think you can do it in Esxi, but proxmox might be worth at least looking into. Plex is in a VM and TrueNAS is in a VM. My SSDs attached to my motherboard have my OS and VMs. My nas drives are connected to an HBA PCIe card. In my case that’s a Dell H740 but a H310 is good to if you need to buy one. They are like $30. The HBA card connects either to a Backplane for hot swap drives or you can get sas to 4x sata breakout cables. All of your NAS drives, probably rust spinners, would connect to the HBA card. In Proxmox we can configure to give the HBA card to the TrueNAS VM so the virtual machine has direct control over the physical PCIe card. This is called PCIe Passthrough. In this configuration Proxmox does not have control over the HBA card hence why the OS drives can’t be connected to it as any drives connected to the HBA card are also controlled by the VM the HBA is passed through to. Once in TrueNAS shares can be setup be it for personal files or Plex media. This give you best of both worlds between having 1 server to do everything and being able to run TrueNAS with physical hardware access.