I just use VM’s for that. I recently learned that Vagrant, an infra as code for virtual machines designed for creating testing VMs, creates an Ansible Inventory that you can run your playbooks at.
I used an old thin client as a pfSense firewall for years… but the DSL into passthrough mode and effectively made that a modem, so in effect pfSense was the “router”
If you don’t have something like that, it’s a step up from a standard ISP one.
Not sure about long term power consumption though…
I put 3 of them into a proxmox cluster with multi network plugged into the WIFI m.2 A+E slots so they can act as router and other servers and I can migrate from system to system when/if I need to do maintenance.
I was about to say something snarky about VMWare, but… Proxmox took me a bit to get used to, but now that I have it figured out, I really like it. It’s totally overkill for me, but one day…
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