I've got a 3 node Proxmox/ceph cluster with 10G, plus a separate Nas. They are all rack mount with dual PSU. Add in the necessary switching, and my average load is about 800w. Throw my desktop (also on 10G) into the mix and it runs 1.1kw.
That's roughly $50-60 extra in electricity costs for me monthly.
I expose quite a few services to the web, so having that extra layer of protection is nice. And it allows me to control what leaves my network from an application perspective, not just TCP/UDP
ZenArmor. It integrates nicely with Opnsense and offers all of the features that I was looking for.
I run a pretty hefty home lab, so my costs are fairly high compared to some.
Overall: $155/mo
I'm a Sysadmin, so my names are purely functional:
host-pmx-01 through 03, my 3 node Proxmox cluster
vm-[SERVICE], optional 01-03 if needed
ct-[SERVICE], for LXC containers
It makes it easy to reference things via DNS for service discovery.
Average load for me is about 750W. I run my desktop from one of the UPS units in my rack, so when that's on it sits around 1.1kW.
The 750W load is across 4 rack servers(1 is the NAS with 12 disks) and 3 switches.
I used to use Booksonic, and it worked pretty well. I've since switched to Audiobookshelf, and it's been great. Client/server works pretty smoothly, and I haven't really had any problems with it.
Unless someone has physical access to the ports/switch that the traffic flows through, they would not be able to see anything besides broadcast/multicast traffic if they were just snooping with Wireshark. The internal switch of proxmox and any hardware switch you have will forward unicast traffic to the ports those Mac's reside on, so without port mirrors setup, no one but you should be able to see that traffic.
We use RoyalTS and I've been very happy with it. I've used mRemoteNG and Mobaxterm in the past, and there really isn't much that would have me switch back. Plus, it supports plenty of other protocols besides SSH, so more of our teams can leverage it.
It's been done to death because memes from Australia will kill you...
My 10G is far from saturated, but I do try and keep things using RAM where possible. I figure that with 100gb of DDR4 in my main server, that should be able to provide enough speed for a 10G link.
I've got ceph running on Intel Enterprise SSDs, so they are pretty quick.
I also tried running ceph on 1G. I found it unreliable as well.