Do Hardware Requirements only pertain to Bare Metal Installs? (eg VMs don't care

[bcboncs]

Excuse my ignorance, I've been out of technology builds for 10-15 years.

I'm trying to build a router and NAS with proxmox, docker, plex, etc. but a hard requirement for me is to have the router on bare metal.

Knowing that there are some hardware requirements/limitations with FreeBSD/opnsense, it's having me second guess a lot of hardware possibilities. There's also folks like Wolfgang that recommend a n5105 but I don't see the Celeron D being a supported hardware requirement yet I'm pretty sure he made it happen (at least in snippets of video).

I'm leaning toward having OpenWRT as the bare metal install (the pipe for inbound & outbound traffic) due to less hardware limitations then opnsense underneath it in a VM/docker container (for all firewall rules, etc.).

Is this feasible? Am I overthinking this? Is this stupid? Any other recommendations before I start buying the hardware?

Minimal hardware thoughts:
- Ideally Mini-ITX (fractal design node 304 or comparable) !!
- 1x 2.5Gb Eth (for Modem to this device)
- Dual band wifi 5 (later upgrade to 6 when more supported) access point for two SSIDs (private w/ all LAN access/segmentation + guest without any LAN access)
- PCIe adapter to use dual band wifi nic is fine too if that's not native.
- ability to stream 1080p flawlessly, bonus if 4k though I don't care too much about that (if you know certain CPU/GPU terminology I should look for in hardware I would appreciate it, the lingo these days is requiring me to research a lot)
- 1x or 2x NVME slots, 4-8 sata ports or PCIe scalability.

Thank you in advance!!