New NAS OS recommendation

[farscapesg1]

As part of our move last December I had to minimize my computer gear from an entire home lab down to a single desktop with an 8TB hard drive and 8TB external to back up to. Fast forward 7 months and I’m needing more storage space but I don’t have room or even want my old lab set back up (Dell R710’s and a Norco 4220 running Openindiana).
With that said, I’m going to reuse the guts from the 4220 into a standard tower case I have and want to keep it relatively simple with no more than 4-6 drives (I have 4 4TB drives right now that will be going in). What I don’t want to do is get back into ZFS with mirrors or replacing entire RAIDZ arrays. If I need more space I just want to add another disk and move on.
I have a HP N54L that has xpenology (DSM 5.0 still I think) that I was using for backup previously and honestly that would be closer to the route I’m looking for but I want to keep my options open.
The main items I really need the system to do is;
1) Storage server
2) Plex backup server
3) Sonarr/Radarr/Sabnzbd services
4) CrashPlan backup service
5) Ubiqiuti service
6) OpenVPN server

Right now we think my options are Xpenology or Unraid.. anything else?

 

[rtangwai]

ESXi

That's how I do it, so I have a mix of OS's (Ubuntu, Server 2012r2, and Win10) and appliances (pfSense, FreeNAS, Cyberpower UPS monitoring service) all in a single hypervisor host.

 

[farscapesg1]

Yeah, I've done that for the last 4 years or so since I was a server admin. Since taking more of a project management role and moving, I've decided to scale things way back and I just want something simple at this point. That's not to say I won't go back to it.. but trying to make due with what I have hardware wise which is a X3440 processor and Supermicro MB. Not a lot of oomph there, and I don't want to deal with PCI passthrough stuff to get an "all in one" set back up. Moved the lab rack out of my office to the garage until I can sell it and I'm enjoying the extra space already.

Also want something relatively simple for the family to manage.. ESXI was never that, probably due to my "need" to have a separate storage server and ESXI host, requiring proper startup sequences after power failures.