I know nothing about what a BPI R4 is. My take : let the router be a router : don’t run container(s) on it. If you need containers: Take a x86 box, Run an hypervisor OS (e.g. Proxmox), create a VM for your router OS (openWRT, OPNsense, etc.) and pass through your Network Interface Card(s). Then run your containers on the host OS or in a dedicated VM.

That’s an impressive stack you were able to build. How long did it take you?

It sucks, doesn’t it? When I saw that you bought WD Red, I was heading out to the comments to alert you of that. Try to return your order, buy Seagate IronWolf instead and remember to never buy WD again.

Man, that’s many levels deep.

Why not do both ? As I understand it, to do kubernetes clusters, you must have at least 3 hosts. They don’t need to be 3 different physical hosts: they could be VM (hosted on Proxmox).

Proxmox also having a very strong implementation of ZFS, then it could be used as the storage « host », and it gives you also the option to do snapshots of the VM (and the storage pool), as well as replication/etc.