Tape is a nice option, but it makes sense if you need to backup a lot of data. I personally have a local NAS, which is used as a backup target, and another one for offsite. You will need a library, tape drives, SAS HBAs. You should plan first and then buy all the equipment you need, As mentioned, you might consider m-disc as an alternative. In case you want to play with Tape, you can test Starwinds VTL. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
Nice setup. Good job!
VMware vSAN cluster, ceph cluster, building HA for different services, containers, k8s cluster. The list goes on.
TrueNAS is an option. However, I am not sure if you can configure active-active cluster with it. As for VMware vSAN, you can place a Witness on a small device (e.g. Raspberry PI). It is a nice option for a homelab. https://williamlam.com/2020/10/vsan-witness-using-raspberry-pi-4-esxi-arm-fling.html
Since you already have Starwinds licenses, I would go for it. 2 node cluster on top of ESXi works great. We have customers using it with no issues.
It should do a great job. I’ve just finished my new build for Jellyfin (migrated from Plex). I have i3-12100 and 32GB of RAM and Jellyfin works great on it.
I haven’t heard about Cosmo. I need to test it. Thanks for sharing.
I prefer using separate subnets for different network adapters. In any case, create vswitch and vmkernel for each network port and configure IPs.