I’ve run mine as a VM for several years now. I haven’t noticed any appreciable impact on performance vs bare metal. I am able to max out my 1000/40 WAN.

That being said, the platform you use to virtualize it on will have an impact. I am running mine on a 3 node proxmox cluster with 10gig networking and SSD backed Ceph storage, so my benchmarks for performance grossly outweigh what my WAN bandwidth can accommodate.

Audiobookshelf is what your wanting then. It does exactly that, and even has a mobile client.

I have one, and I love it. It bridges my large UPS and the mains power, so that if either one of those fail, then things keep running. I have it on mains in case something kicks up too high and overloads the UPS.

This is very similar to how I run mine, except that I use Ceph instead of ZFS. Nightly backups of the CephFS data with Duplicati, followed by staggered nightly backups for all VMs and containers to a PBS VM on a the NAS. File backups from unraid get sent up to CrashPlan.

Slightly fewer retention points to cut down on overall storage, and a similar test pattern.

Yes, current sysadmin.