I’ve been satisfied with Reolink for a couple of years, and I’ll be installing another next week.
I use a hardware NVR with it’s own HDDs and it’s own separate PoE network connecting all of the cameras, but since you are using your ZFS storage you will substitute the NVR unit with something like Blue Iris. There are several options for NVR software.
I’d recommend dnsmasq for a DNS/DHCP server component. It is time tested, used on some consumer routers as a daily-driver industry component. It has a far easier learning curve compared to the like of ISC’s offering, and the feature gaps are not going to affect you until you have a firm grasp on many deeper DNS or DHCP nuances.
I’ve had similar thoughts some several months ago, but I haven’t even figured out how to get a stable desktop environment in a VM (my experience with Linux is mostly in server-land). My overall approach for idempotency is a git repository that has a Terraform blueprint and an Ansible blueprint, and the whole kit is pointed at my home ProxMox cluster.
With this workflow I can lift and shift my entire localnet wherever I want in the future.
You could use a much simpler blueprint approach to accomplish your Desktop Environment VM. You’ll want to externalize any data that won’t get included in a blueprint rebuild (databases, games save files, media libraries, etc.).
I’m no expert, but my take on the situation is that POSIX is a very old, very stable, relatively powerful API. If figure out a workflow that uses only POSIX tools, then you have very high confidence that you can reuse that workflow across any POSIX-compliant environment.